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RELIGION AND THE WAR 



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RELIGION AND THE WAR 

BY MEMBERS OF THE FACULTY OF THE 
SCHOOL OF RELIGION, YALE UNIVERSITY 

EDITED BY 

E. HERSHEY SNEATH, Ph.D., LL.D. 




NEW HAVEN 

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD 

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

MDCCCCXVIII 



.0^ 



^^p<-^' 



COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY 
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 



DEC 23 1918 

©CLA511032 



PUBLISHED ON THE FOUNDATION 
ESTABLISHED IN MEMORY OF 

JAMES WESLEY COOPER 

OF THE CLASS OF 1865, YALE COLLEGE 



The present volume is the second work published by the Yale 
University Press on the James Wesley Cooper Memorial Publica- 
tion Fund. This Foundation was established March 30, 1918, by 
a gift to Yale University from Mrs. Ellen H. Cooper in memory 
of her husband, Rev. James Wesley Cooper, D.D., who was born 
in New Haven, Connecticut, October 6, 1842, and died in New 
York City, March 16, 1916. Dr. Cooper was a member of the Class 
of 1865, Yale College, and for twenty-five years pastor of the 
South Congregational Church of New Britain, Connecticut. For 
thirty years he was a corporate member of the American Board of 
Commissioners for Foreign Missions and from 1885 until the time 
of his death was a Fellow of Yale University, serving on the 
Corporation as one of the Successors of the Original Trustees. 



Not in dumb resignation. 

We lift our hands on high ; 
Not like the nerveless fatalist, 

Content to do and die. 
Our faith springs like the eagle's, 

That soars to meet the sun, 
And cries exulting unto Thee, 

"O Lord, Thy will be done." 

When tyrant feet are trampling 

Upon the common weal. 
Thou dost not bid us bend and writhe 

Beneath the iron heel; 
In Thy name we assert our right 

By sword, or tongue, or pen, 
And e'en the headsman's axe may flash 

Thy message unto men. 

Thy will, — it bids the weak be strong; 

It bids the strong be just: 
No lip to fawn, no hand to beg. 

No brow to seek the dust. 
Wherever man oppresses man 

Beneath the liberal sun, 
O Lord, be there. Thine arm made bare. 

Thy righteous will be done. 

— John Hay. 



PREFACE 

Religious interests are quite as much involved in the world war as 
social and political interests. The moral and spiritual issues are 
tremendous, and the problems that arise concerning "the mighty 
hopes that make us men," — hopes that relate to the Kingdom of 
God on earth, — are such as not only to perplex our most earnest 
faith, but also to challenge our most consecrated purpose. It is 
the sincere hope of those who have contributed to this volume that 
it may prove helpful in the solution of some of these problems.. 

E. H. S. 

Yale University, 
August 21, 1918 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. Moral and Spiritual Forces in the War . . 11 

Charles Reynolds Brown, D.D., LL.D., Dean of 
the School of Religion and Pastor of the University 
Church 

II. God and History 22 

Douglas Clyde Macintosh, Ph.D., Professor of 
Theology 

III. The Christian Hope in Times of War . . 33 

Frank Chamberlin Porter, Ph.D., Professor of 
Biblical Theology 

IV. Non-Resistance: Christian or Pagan.'' . .59 

Benjamin Wisner Bacon, D.D., Litt.D., LL.D., 
Professor of New Testament Criticism and Inter- 
pretation 

V. The Ministry and the War . . . . 82 

Henry Hallam Tweedy, M.A., Professor of Practi- 
cal Theology 

VI. . The Effect of the War upon Religious Education 105 
Luther Allan Weigle, Ph.D., D.D., Professor of 
Christian Nurture 

VII. Foreign Missions and the War, Today and To- 
morrow ...... 122 

Harlan P. Beach, D.D., F.R.G.S., Professor of the 
Theory and Practice of Missions 



10 CONTENTS 

PAGE 

VIII. The War and Social Work . . . .141 

William Bacon Bailey, Ph.D., Professor of Practi- 
cal Philanthropy 

IX. The War and Church Unity . . . ^ . 151 

Williston Walker, Ph.D., D.D., Professor of 
Ecclesiastical History 

X. The Religious Basis of World Re-Organization . 161 
E. Hershey Sneath, Ph.D., LL.D., Professor of 
the Philosophy of Religion and Religious Educa- 
tion 



I 

MORAL AND SPIRITUAL FORCES IN THE WAR 

CHARLES REYNOLDS BROWN 

In one of our more thoughtful magazines we were favored last 
February with an article entitled, "Peter Sat by the Fire Warm- 
ing Himself." It was a bitter, undiscriminating arraignment of the 
ministers and churches of the United States for their alleged 
lack of intelligent, sympathetic interest in the war. It was written 
by an Englishman who for several years has been vacillating 
between the ministry and secular journalism, but is now the pastor 
of a small church in northern New York. The vigor of his literary 
style in trenchant criticism was matched by an equally vigorous 
disregard for many of the plain facts in the case. His tone, how- 
ever, was loud and confident, so that the article secured for itself 
a wide reading. 

"What became of the spiritual leaders of America during those 
thirty-two months when Europe and parts of Asia were passing 
through Gehenna .f"' the writer of this article asked in scornful 
fashion. And then after listing the enormities of the mad military 
caste which heads up at Potsdam, he asked the clergymen of the 
United States, "Why were you so scrupulously neutral, so 
benignly dumb.'"' His main contention was to the effect that the 
religious leaders of this country had been altogether negligent of 
their duty in the present world struggle, and that the churches 
were small potatoes and few in a hill. 

It has been regarded as very good form in certain quarters to 
cast aspersion upon the ministers of the Gospel. When the war 
came men began to ask, sometimes with a sneer, and sometimes 



12 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

with a look of pain, "Why did not Christianity prevent the war?" 
It never seemed to occur to anyone to ask, "Why did not Science 
prevent the war?"- No one supposed that Science would or could. 
It was the most scientific nation on earth which brought on 
the war. 

It never occurred to anyone to ask,' "Why did not Big Business, 
or the Newspapers, or the Universities prevent the war? No one 
supposed that commerce or the press or education could avert 
such disasters. These useful forms of social energy are not strong 
enough. They do not go deep enough in their hold upon the lives 
of men to curb those forces of evil which let loose upon the world 
this frightful war. It was a magnificent tribute which men paid 
to the might of spiritual forces when they asked, sometimes wist- 
fully, and sometimes scornfully, "Why did not Christianity 
prevent the war?" 

The terrible events of the last four years have taught the 
world a few lessons which it will not soon forget. They have 
shown us the utter impotence of certain forces in which some 
shortsighted people were inclined to put their whole trust: The 
little toy gods of the Amo rites — Evolution, with a capital E, not 
as the designation of a method which all intelligent people 
recognize, but as a kind of home-made deity operating on its own 
behalf ! The Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Age, all in capitals ! The 
"Cosmic Urge," whatever that pretentious phrase may mean in 
the mouths of those who use it in grandiloquent fashion ! The 
"Stream of Progress," the idea that there are certain resident 
forces in the physical order itself which make inevitably for 
human well-being and advance quite apart from any thought 
of God ! 

All these have shown themselves no more able to safeguard the 
welfare of society than so many stone images. They broke down 
utterly in the presence of those forces of evil which now menace 
the very fabric of civilization. The forces of self-interest unhal- 
lowed and undirected by any finer forms of spiritual energy have 



MORAL AND SPIRITUAL FORCES IN THE WAR 13 

covered a whole continent with grief and pain. They have written 
a most impressive commentary upon that word of the ancient 
prophet, "The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations 
that forget God." Men are saying on all sides that unless hope 
is to be found in religion, in the action of the spirit of the Living 
God upon the lives of men, then hope there is none. What other 
guarantee have we that the greed and the lust, the hatred and 
the ambition of wrong-hearted men may not again wreck the 
hopes of the race! 

But still that question presses for an answer- — Why did not 
these spiritual forces for which Christianity stands prevent the 
war.P I have my own idea about that. It was because we did not 
have enough of Christianity' on hand in those fateful summer days 
of 1914, and what we had was not always o'f the right sort. In 
certain countries the churches had been emphasizing the personal 
and private virtues of sobriety, chastity, kindliness and the like ; 
they had been preparing the souls of men for residence in a 
blessed Hereafter. But they had not given adequate attention 
to the organized life of men in political and economic relations. 
They had not sufficiently exalted the weightier matters of justice, 
mercy and truth in the social organism. These things they ought 
to have done, and not to have left the other undone. 

The founder of our faith in the first public address he gave 
there in the synagogue at Nazareth struck the social note clearly 
and firmly. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he hath 
anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor. He hath sent 
me to bind up the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the 
captives, to set at liberty them that are bruised, and to pro- 
claim" — in all the high places of the organized life of the race^ — 
"the acceptable year of the Lord." 

This was the platform on which he stood. This indicated the 
spirit and method of his mission. Organized and corporate 
righteousness was to be an essential element in the Gospel of the 
Son of God. The leaders of our Christian faith should have been 



14 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

voicing that same demand for social righteousness all the way! 
from Berlin to Bagdad, and from London to the uttermost parts 
of the earth. The only Christianity which can avert similar 
disaster in the future is that Christianity which, like the Apostles 
of old, goes everywhere, preaching and practising the Gospel 
of the Kingdom, the sway and rule of the Divine Spirit in all the 
affairs of men. 

It was highly significant, however, that the one nation in 
Europe which had gone farthest toward an atheistic materialism, 
toward a philosophy of force, a complete reliance upon physical 
efficiency and mental cleverness quite apart from any moral 
considerations, toward a flat indifference to all those manifesta- 
tions of the religious spirit which are found in public worship, 
in missionary effort, and in the cultivation of a humble, devout 
spirit — it was the nation which had gone farthest in that direction 
which did more than any other nation to bring on the war. 

And, conversely, it was that nation which had gone farther 
than any other nation in Europe toward making the religion of 
Jesus Christ a power for good in public and in private life which 
did more than any other single nation in those fateful July days 
to avert the war, and when war came it was that same nation 
which did more than any other nation to resist the encroach- 
ments of lawlessness and crime as we have seen them in Belgium 
and in northern France. We have had abundant reason to thank 
God for the Christianity there was in the lives of such men as 
Herbert H. Asquith, Arthur J. Balfour, and David Lloyd George, 
and in the lives of the brave men and women who have nobly 
sustained them in their righteous contention. We could only have 
wished that the world had been possessed of a hundred times as 
much of that sort of Christianity ; that would have prevented 
the war. 

And when war came these spiritual forces still had something 
to say for themselves. Christianity had been pressing home upon 
the hearts of men those more vital principles until nine-tenths 



MORAL AND SPIRITUAL FORCES IN THE WAR 15 

of all the earth was ashamed of the war. Not a single nation was 
willing to stand up and accept responsibility for bringing it on — 
not even Germany. That military caste in Potsdam has tried by 
all manner of intellectual shuffling to save its face by seeking to 
make it appear to its own people that the war was one of self- 
defense thrust upon them by unscrupulous enemies. The claim 
was so absurd that the whole world laughed it to scorn, even 
before the striking revelations were made by Prince Lichnowsky, 
the German ambassador at London in the summer of 1914. The 
effort did, however, serve to make plain the fact that the German 
Government has not entirely lost the power of being ashamed of 
itself. 

One hundred years ago it was not so. The Napoleonic wars 
dragged out their weary length for twenty-two sad years, but it 
never occurred to Napoleon or to France to apologize for those 
wars which were, for the most part, frankly wars of aggression 
and conquest. War was taken as a matter of course. It was costly, 
» irrational, inhuman, then as it is now, but it did not have arrayed 
against it the moral sense of the race as that moral sense has come 
to be arrayed against this method of settling international diffi- 
culties in this twentieth century. In these days war is looked upon 
by all right-minded nations as the devil's own business, only to be 
accepted by right-minded nations as a last dire necessity when 
thrust upon them by governments which scruple not at either 
honor or right. It is something for the spiritual forces of earth 
to have accomplished that. 

Moreover, when the war came never before in all its history had 
the world seen so much done in the way of humane service. It has 
been done to relieve the pain of wounded soldiers and to meet the 
necessities of those helpless people whose homes have been de- 
stroyed by the ravages of war. It has all been done in the name 
of the Red Cross — the name is significant, as is the spirit behind 
it. It is the flowering out, not of Buddhism or Mohammedanism, 
not of some fancy brand of atheism or some philosophy of force — 



16 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

men do not gather grapes of thorns nor figs from thistles. It is 
the flowering out of the religion of him who died for men upon 
a cross. 

The people of this country alone came forward and in a single 
week by voluntary contributions gave one hundred millions of 
dollars for this humane service. Then within less than a year the 
same people contributed a further fund of one hundred and 
seventy millions of dollars for the relief of wounded soldiers and 
for the relief of stricken people in Belgium and Poland, in Serbia 
and Armenia, whose names we do not know, whose languages we 
cannot speak, but whose sufferings we have made our own in 
warmest sympathy. It was the response of a nation to the words 
of its Master — "I was hungry and ye fed me. I was naked and 
ye clothed me. I was sick and in prison and ye visited me. I was 
a stranger and ye took me in." It is something for the spiritual 
forces to have thus enthroned the spirit of humane service in the 
hearts of men. 

More than that, never before in military history has so much 
been done to safeguard the moral welfare of the young men who 
have been called to the colors. The officers of our own army and 
of those armies with whom we are allied have by personal example 
and by public utterance struck a clear, firm note for sobriety and 
clean living, which cannot be matched in the history of any 
other war. 

The Young Men's Christian Association by its work for the 
soldiers has leaped at a bound into a place of national and inter- 
national significance. And the Young Men's Christian Association 
is simply the Christian church functioning in a particular way. 
Its honored head, John R. Mott, was converted in and is now a 
member of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Its secretaries and 
other workers are drawn, all of them, from the membership of 
our churches. And the money which makes possible its world- 
wide activities is given mainly by the people of the churches. The 
people of this country were asked for thirty-five millions of 



MORAL AND SPIRITUAL FORCES IN THE WAR 17 

dollars, and in a single week they oversubscribed the request, 
giving fifty millions of dollars to carry on this fine form of 
Christian effort. It was the act of a nation saying to the young 
men under arms, "Fight your good fight but keep your faith, 
and finish your course with honor, that there may be laid up for 
every man of you a crown of rejoicing." 

And more than that, the spiritual forces at work in this broad 
land have kept the motives of our country high and fine. We 
have not entered into this war with any selfish desire for con- 
quest — as God knows our hearts, we do npt covet an acre of 
territory belonging to any other power on earth. We have not 
entered this war with any sordid desire for material gain. We 
were already becoming disgracefully rich in the manufacture of 
munitions and in furnishing supplies to the belligerent nations. 
If they could have fought it through without our help, it would 
have been money in our purse to have stayed out — as it is, it will 
cost us no one can say how many billions of dollars. We have not 
entered this war in any spirit of touchiness because our national 
honor- has been offended — it has been offended most grievously, 
but we are too strong and too sane to plunge a whole country 
into war for that. 

We are not undertaking to punish Germany, greatly as we 
believe the present government of Germany needs punishing. We 
remember who it was who said, "Vengeance is mine. I will 
repay, saith the Lord," and we are content to leave the matter 
of penalty in his powerful hands. We are not undertaking to 
dictate to the German people what sort of government they should 
have. We are willing they should have any sort of government they 
like, so*^ long as they keep it for home consumption. We believe 
here that all governments derive their just powers from the con- 
sent of the governed. We confess to a frank preference for the 
methods of democracy, and we could wish no happier lot for any 
land than to live under the reign of the common people. We like 
to remember that in the year of our Lord 1815, Great Britain 



18 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

and her Allies put a certain island on the map — they put the 
island of St. Helena on the map by banishing to that island the 
disturber of the peace of Europe. And if in the year of our Lord 
1919 the United States and her Allies should in similar fashion 
put some other island on the map by banishing to that island the 
present disturber of the peace of Europe, nine-tenths of all the 
human race would rise up and thank God. 

We entered upon this war because we were not willing to 
stand by . and allow other nations to be crippled and broken 
in the resistance they were offering to lawlessness and crime, and 
in the defense they were making for those principles of justice 
and freedom which are the glory of our own national history. 
And so we have come forward to do our part and to fill up that 
which is lacking' in the sacrifices which other nations have been 
making for the sake of principle. 

As I move about among my fellow citizens, north, south, east 
and west, these are the questions which I find engaging their 
minds : Is might to be allowed to usurp the place of right, or are 
we here to see to it that in the long run right is the only might.'' 
Is international good faith only an empty phrase, or is it a mag- 
nificent reality in the moral world to be upheld at any cost? Is 
that body of usages and agreements slowly built up by centuries 
of effort, which constitutes our international law, to be trampled 
under foot by any nation for the sake of some immediate advan- 
tage, or is it meant to be obeyed .f* Is the whole world to be per- 
manently at the mercy of any military caste which may undertake 
to impose its will upon the rest of mankind by the practice of 
fright fulness, or is there possible some such World League of 
Nations as shall have both the mind and the power to keep the 
peace and good order of the world.'' 

These are moral questions. They are religious questions, where 
there is a will of God to be ascertained and realized. And because 
our people have vision for the full recognition of the place 



MORAL AND SPIRITUAL FORCES IN THE WAR 19 

spiritual forces have in the making of history, this struggle 
enlists the complete moral support of the nation. 

It was the moral idealism of the war which brought Great 
Britain and all her distant colonies promptly into line the moment 
the moral quality of the German Government stood revealed in 
all its hideousness by its outrage upon Belgium. It was the moral 
passion of Britain which enabled her to raise by voluntary 
enlistment an army of more than five millions of men. 

It was the moral idealism of the war which brought all sections 
of our own country strongly to the support of the President 
when the fact was made plain that it was a fight for the right of 
free peoples to live and move and have their being in honor. It 
was the moral idealism of the war which brought the choicest 
youth of our land, the sons of good fortune and the sons of toil, 
the young men of the colleges and the young men less privileged, 
to stand shoulder to shoulder in this struggle for righteousness. 
We have seen it on the Campus here at Yale, as other men have 
seen it in all the colleges and universities of the land. The spirit 
of our youth has been nobly expressed in those lines on "The 
Spires of Oxford" : 

I saw the spires of Oxford 

As I was passing by, 

The gray spires of Oxford 

Against the pearl-gray sky; 

My heart was with the Oxford men 

Who went abroad to die. 

The years go fast in Oxford, 
The golden years and gay. 
The hoary colleges look down 
On careless boys at play; 
But when the bugles sounded war 
They put their games away. 



20 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

They left the peaceful river, 
The cricket field, the quad, 
The shaven lavrns of Oxford 
To seek a bloody sod; 
They gave their merry youth away 
For country and for God. 

God rest you happy, gentlemen. 
Who laid your good lives down. 
Who took the khaki and the gun 
Instead of cap and gown. 
God bring you to a fairer place 
Than even Oxford town. 

It was a great Christian statesman, it was William Ewart 
Gladstone, prime minister of Great Britain, who said more than 
thirty years ago, "The greatest triumph of the twentieth century 
will be the enthronement of the idea of public right as the govern- 
ing idea in the affairs of Europe." We are here this day to assist 
with the last ounce of our strength and with the full might of 
our moral purpose in the enthronement and the coronation of 
that idea of public right as the governing idea in the affairs of 
the whole world. 

The moral values which are at stake in all this national and 
international action have been made so clear in the fierce red 
light which has beat upon the world that the very conscience of 
the country has put on khaki. The moral sense of the whole nation 
has become militant. The brave men and women of this land are 
working and fighting for human betterment with their eyes upon 
that social order which hath foundations whose builder and maker 
is God. And because we feel that our cause is just, we feel in our 
arms and in our hearts, each man of us, the strength of ten. 

May we not believe that this country, strong and brave, gen- 
erous and hopeful, is called of God to be in its own way a Mes- 
sianic nation in whose mighty unfolding life all the nations of 
the earth may be blessed .? Hear these words of an ancient prophet 



MORAL AND SPIRITUAL FORCES IN THE WAR 21 

and make them your own! "What people has God so nigh unto 
them as the Lord our God is in all things that we call upon Him 
for? Has God assayed to take him a nation from the midst of 
another nation by signs, by wonders and by war, as the Lord 
hath done for you? Did ever a people hear the Voice of God speak- 
ing out of the midst of the fire as thou hast heard? What nation 
has statutes and judgments so righteous as the law which I set 
before you this day? Keep therefore and do them, for this is your 
wisdom and your understanding among the nations." 

It is for this country to keep its motives high and fine, to set 
its affections upon those principles of action which are above the 
dead level of self-interest, and to so bear itself in the service of 
the higher civilization that in its purposes and methods all the 
nations of the earth may be blessed. 

O beautiful my country, ours once more^ 

What were our lives without thee, 

What all our lives to save thee ! 

We reck not what we give thee. 

We will not dare to doubt thee, 

But ask whatever else and we will dare. 



II 

GOD AND HISTORY 
DOUGLAS CLYDE MACINTOSH 

Most urgent among the religious problems of the day is the ques- 
tion as to the relation of God to the events of current history 
As was to be expected, many erroneous notions are prevalent 
concerning divine providence and the present war. Some of these 
errors are owing to intellectual confusion; others, however, im- 
press one as due to an almost wilful perversion of the impulsest 
of religious faith. In any case, most conspicuous among the 
erroneous doctrines of the day with reference to divine providence 
is that voiced by the German Emperor, in speaking of the Teutonic 
triumph over disorganized Russia. His words are reported as 
follows : "The complete victory fills me with gratitude. It permits 
us to live again one of those great moments in which we can 
reverently admire God's hand in history. What turn events have! 
taken is by the disposition of God." One could scarcely be blamed 
for inferring that the Kaiser imagines, or affects to believe, that 
the Almighty has entered into a favored-nation treaty of some 
sort with Germany. But even this would seem to fall short of 
what is claimed. We quote further from the same theological 
authority. "The year 1917 with its great battles has proved," he, 
asserts, with almost incredible simple-mindedness, "that the Ger-| 
man people has in the Lord of Creation above an unconditional 
and avowed ally on whom it can absolutely rely." This curious 
reversion to religious tribalism in the case of the German Emperor 
is not without its parallel in the belief of his subjects. Assiduously 
taught, as they have been, that they are fighting a justified defen- 



GOD AND HISTORY 23 

sive war, and praying, as they have been, for victory over their 
enemies, their conviction has come to be, pretty generally, what 
a German- American in the early days of the war expressed in 
these words, "If Germany doesn't win this war, there is no God !" 
Well, in view of what the world knows as to the causation and the 
conduct of this war on the part of Germany, the only answer so 
preposterous a doctrine deserves is that given by ex-President 
Taft, "Germany has mistaken the devil for God!" 

But the Germans are not the only ones who are cherishing mis- 
taken notions as to the providence of God in human affairs. We 
and our Allies reject the idea of a national God, and any notion 
of the "Lord of Creation" being our "unconditional ally." The 
morally perfect God is too just and impartial to have any favor- 
ites among the nations, whether Jewish, or German, or British, 
or American. Might does not make right, we know; and no more 
is might an infallible index to God's will. God is not necessarily 
"on the side of the heaviest battalions." On the contrary, the true 
God, as the God of righteousness, must be, we feel sure, on the 
side of right and justice, whichever side that may be. Being con- 
fident, therefore, of the justice of our cause, we feel that we have 
the best of reasons for believing that we are fighting on the side 
of God, as well as for the true well-being of humanity. 

So far, good; but many among us proceed to put two and two 
together and find that they make five. If we are on the side of 
human rights and the will of God, and if God is sufficient for our ' 
religious needs, is it not clear that we may be absolutely certain 
of winning the war, whatever temporary reverses may have to be 
encountered .f' Moreover, especially since we have had our days of 
prayer for victory, are we not entitled to sing. 

Then conquer we must, for our cause it is just, 
And this be our motto, "In God is our trust"? 

Indeed, so satisfied are we with the logic of our position that mul- 
titudes of us would agree with the sentiment expressed by a 



24 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

British- American in the early days of the war, "If Germany wins 
this war, there is no God." 

But there are reasons for doubting the correctness of this view. 
Right makes God's will, surely enough; but is it certain that the 
side whose cause is just will win the war, simply because it is the 
side of right and of God.'' Ultimately, we may be sure, right must 
prevail, for wrong is not the sort of thing that can permanently 
succeed; it contains within itself the germs of its own ultimate 
destruction. But nothing in history can be surer than that this 
ultimate judgment upon evil does not necessarily involve the 
defeat of all unjustified military undertakings. The side with the 
greater moral justification has not always won its battles, nor 
even its wars. It is not enough to have justice on our side; we 
must use our might on the side of right. Right has to be worked 
for, and sometimes it has to be fought for. That is the kind of 
world that — not unfortunately for our development, probably — 
we are living in. And the fighting is no sham battle. Its issue is 
not predetermined. It is being decided while the fighting is 
going on. 

Moreover, with reference to prayer as a military factor, it is 
only fair to note that in the present war many sincere and believ- 
ing prayers for victory have been offered on both sides. It is not 
intended to deny that religion of a certain sort is an important 
military factor; sincere and believing prayer for a cause that 
is regarded as sacred and just undoubtedly helps morale, both 
in the army and throughout the nation. But it is a factor which 
in this war has operated on both sides. Man has the capacity for 
misusing not only physical, but even spiritual forces. But, on the 
other hand, when prayer and religious faith encourage an easy- 
going attitude, and are thus made to some extent a substitute 
for effort, such prayer and faith cannot but prove a serious mili- 
tary hindrance, no matter how just the cause may be that they 
are designed to support. They may even conceivably make 



GOD AND HISTORY 25 

enough of a difference on the wrong side to lead to the defeat of 
righteousness. 

These notions as to God's providence in war, which we have 
criticized as manifestly mistaken and dangerously misleading, are 
symptomatic of confused and muddy thinking on the Whole subject 
of the providence of God in human history. How does God secure 
his adequate providential control of the course of history? One 
theory is that he has secured it by having absolutely predeter- 
mined from the beginning all events of nature and history, so that 
all process is the simple unfolding of what has been eternally 
decreed. There are the strongest ethical and religious reasons for 
refusing to accept this unproved and unprovable dogma. On the 
one hand, it would mean that man's consciousness of free agency 
and moral responsibility would have to be regarded as quite 
illusory, since what has been decided and made inevitable before 
man's life began cannot have been originated by man himself. On 
the other hand, this predestination doctrine would mean that God 
should be regarded as the real and responsible cause of all evil, 
including what we call human sin. No such God would be moral 
enough to be trustworthy or deserving of human adoration. 

Another theory as to how God secures his adequate providential 
control of the course of events is that it is by various sorts of 
arbitrary or unconditioned interventions in external nature, as 
well as in human life, in order to realize the ends he may desire 
to accomplish from time to time. It has often been suggested, for 
instance, that a miracle of this sort took place at the Marne, 
preventing the German entry into Paris. But this theory is open 
to the objection that it raises three unanswerable questions. In 
the first place, how can we be sure that such interventions have 
taken place, particularly in the external world? How do you 
suppose it will ever be established sufficiently for confident rational 
belief, that only by special miracle were the German armies turned 
back from Paris in 1914? In the second place, if such special 
miraculous interventions do take place for the sake of preventing 



26 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

evil, why do they not take place oftener, especially in these times 
of unprecedented disaster to human life? A miracle like that of 
the Marne, such as would have turned the Turks back from the 
helpless Armenians, would haA^e been much appreciated. But, for 
a third question, if such miracles were to take place as often as 
this theory of providence would seem to call for, what would 
become of the order of nature, and how could man learn what to 
expect, or how to adjust himself to his environment? 

As against these theories of absolute predetermination and 
arbitrary intervention, we may point out that God secures his 
adequate providential control of the course of history in two 
principal ways, viz., by enough predetermination of events to give 
man a dependable universe to live in and learn from, and by 
enough intervention to admit of a response to man's need of the 
religious experience of salvation, that is, of being inwardly or 
spiritually prepared to meet in the right way and with triumphant 
spirit the very worst that the future may bring. The predeter- 
mined order of the laws of nature and mind exhibits the general 
providence of God. By means of this order, or in the light of conse- 
quences, God is teaching man both science and morality, that is, 
how to adapt means to the realization of ends, and what ideals 
and principles of action must be employed if the most desirable 
results are to be obtained. The "intervention enough" of which 
we spoke — if indeed it is to be called intervention — or, in other 
words, the response, of the divine Reality to the right religious 
attitude on the part of man, is an exhibition of the special provi- 
dence of God. When one has found the right relation to God and 
gained access to the divine power for the inner life, one is virtually 
prepared for whatever can happen to him. But, as we have indi- 
cated, his preparedness is primarily inner, spiritual. He is in a 
position to meet danger with moral courage, to gain the victory 
over temptation; to make the most of opportunities for service; 
to endure hardship, pain and privation, as a good soldier, with 
patience and cheerfulness ; to face death — his own or that of 



I 



GOD AND HISTORY 27 

others — and whatever there may be after death, with faith and 
equanimity. 

There are two possible ways, then, in which God may exercise 
his providence in the events of human history. There is his shorter 
and preferred method, and his longer and more roundabout 
method. If the individuals concerned come into the right relation 
to God, there is the best possible guarantee that they will be made 
ready for all there may be for them to do and to experience, and 
thus conditions will be most favorable for the speedy realization 
of the will of God. But if this shorter, preferred method cannot 
be employed, because men fail to rise to the occasion as they might 
if they would rightly relate themselves to God, the divine provi- 
dence will still be exercised, although necessarily in the less desir- 
able, more roundabout way. God will let man choose the wrong 
way, through thoughtlessness or wilfulness, and then let him take 
the bitter consequences of failure, that he may finally learn to 
guard against similar mistakes and faults in the future. 

Let us now return to the more particular question of the rela- 
tion of the providence of God to the present war. Before dis- 
cussing again the question with which we started, viz., as to the 
final outcome of the conflict, we may deal with some other aspects 
of the problem. In the light of what has been said of the two pos- 
sible methods of divine providence, it may be denied that the war 
was providentially caused by God in order to curb other evils, 
such as softness and idleness, or the selfish pursuit of wealth and 
pleasure, or drunkenness and vice, or thoughtlessness and irre- 
ligion. It is true enough that in the face of war conditions some 
of these evils have been decreased, and the martial qualities of 
self-sacrificing courage and fortitude have been stimulated. But 
it is notoriously true that the advent of war introduces a host 
of evils, in some cases necessarily, in others almost as inevitably. 
Drunkenness tends to increase greatly, unless stern measures are 
taken for its repression. Vice, with the resulting transmissible 
diseases, ordinarily becomes much more prevalent. Hatred, 



28 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

cruelty, and even the most fiendish brutality are given ample 
opportunity to develop, and in many instances they become rela- 
tively fixed attitudes and attributes of character. So far from the 
biologically fittest tending to survive, under modern war condi- 
tions these are the very ones who, for the most part and to the 
incalculable detriment of the future of the race, are killed off, 
even granting that of those who are "fit" enough to get to the 
front, the weakest are those who have the poorest chance of sur- 
vival. And finally, when the stress of war conditions becomes 
acute, innumerable enterprises for social betterment are con- 
strained to be given up, at least for the time being. In view, then, 
of all this, not to dwell upon the unspeakable suffering, physical 
and mental, on the part not only of combatants, but of non- 
combatants as well, and considering the merely problematical 
nature of the good to which the crisis involved in a state of war 
may prove a stimulus, it must be regarded as incredible that a 
God good enough and wise enough to be worthy of absolute 
dependence and worship could have ordered so stupendous a 
catastrophe as a possible means of human salvation. Neither is 
it reasonable to suppose that God is prolonging the war, in order 
that some social evils, such as drunkenness, may be eradicated 
before victory is finally secured. This might, perhaps, be the out- 
come, if the war were greatly prolonged; but it could not be at 
all certain beforehand that any such improvement would be per- 
manent enough to offset the evils involved in the continuation of 
the war. We cannot suppose anyone who was wise enough and 
good enough to be God would be so far below our best human 
standards as to will either the existence or the continuation of 
the war as a whole, with all its attendant evils, in order that final 
good might abound. Any God who might be thought of as doing 
so would be a false God; his condemnation would be just. 

Understanding, then, that in so far as human hatred, selfish- 
ness and stupidity have been factors in leading to the war, it has 
been originated, not by the will or in the providence of God, but 



GOD AND HISTORY 29 

against his will and providence ; understanding also that in so far 
as it has been prolonged by human inefficiency or stupidity, or 
by the efficiency of evil wills, or of wills in the service of wrong, 
its continuation has not been in accordance with but in opposition 
to his will and providence, let us turn to the more positive aspect 
of the divine providence in connection with the war. It may be 
said to begin with, that in so far as going into this war has been 
correctly judged by any party to it to be the necessary alternative 
to national perfidy, or ignoble servitude, or any other evil greater 
than those involved in passing through the ordeal of war, and 
in so far as the task has been accepted as a solemn duty and 
entered upon in brave and self-sacrificing spirit, the act of going 
to war is to be regarded as in accord with the will of God. Indeed, 
if we may regard the divine spirit as immanent whe]*e we find the 
divine qualities present in human life, we may go further and say 
that such righteous participation in the war is the work of God 
within the soul of man, fighting against the forces of evil. More- 
over, in so far as the war is prolonged by the fortitude of men of 
good intentions and their fidelity to a just cause, the war may 
similarly be said to be prolonged in accord with the will and even 
by the work of God in and through the good will and work of men. 
But of providence in relation to the war as a whole, it can only 
be said that man's evil choice has compelled God to use the long, 
roundabout method. It is the second best method, although the 
best possible under the circumstances. The sinful choices of men 
and nations were not, of course, divinely predetermined. What 
has been divinely predetermined, we may well believe, is the law- 
abiding order of nature and of individual and social mind, accord- 
ing to which the disasters and sufferings incidental to war are 
the inevitable consequences of certain forms of individual and 
corporate wrong doing. In this roundabout way certain reforms 
may be providentially forced upon the nations by the war. The 
evil consequences of certain former evils tend to be more acutely 
felt under the strain and stress of severe and prolonged warfare. 



30 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

Let us suppose that in order to win the war we and our Allies 
may yet find it necessary to take drastic steps to eradicate 
drunkenness with its attendant evils, or even to prohibit the waste 
of food-stuffs and fuel involved in the manufacture of alcoholic 
beverages. This would not mean that the war had been divinely 
caused in order to realize this end, but only that it was and always 
is the divine will that man should learn the lessons of the law of 
consequences, which lessons are in some instances more readily 
learned in time of war. 

But what God is teaching most directly through the law of 
consequences in connection with the war is the necessity of cor- 
recting certain immoral international relations. He is teaching 
the nations through bitter experience how imperative are inter- 
national righteousness and some practicable and adequately 
democratic scheme of world-government. 

But we must not close our eyes to the possibility that through 
our failure to do our part, God may be forced to take the long, 
sad, roundabout way of exercising his providence in connection 
with the end, as he had to in the beginning of the war. What we 
must wake up to is this, that in spite of the justice of our cause, 
in spite of its being the cause of humanity and in essential accord 
with the will of God, and in spite of our days of prayer and our 
optimistic religious faith, Germany may win this war ! If our 
consciousness of being right and our religious optimism make us 
so complacent that we shall fail to exert our utmost strength on 
behalf of our righteous cause, they may be the very factors that 
will turn the tide of war against us. We have resources enough for 
the winning of victory. If we fail it will be a moral failure. If we 
fail to rise to the moral demands of this great occasion, God may 
have to let us fail to win the war and then learn what we can from 
the bitter consequences of this failure. We and future generations 
may have to learn through tragic experience how imperative it 
is that right be not left to enforce itself, but that we devote our 
full might to the cause of right, and that before it is too late. 



GOD AND HISTORY 31 

At the time of writing these words — in the early days of May, 
1918 — it seems not yet too late, however critical the situation, 
for the winning of victory for the cause of liberty and justice. 
But the surest way of providing for success would be for all who 
recognize the right so to surrender themselves to the will of God 
for self-sacrificing service, and so to depend upon the indwelling 
power of God for inner preparedness for whatever may have to 
be faced and whatever may have to be done, that their whole might 
may be made use of in this warfare for the right. Our primary need 
is morale — morale in the government, morale in the shipyards, 
morale in the munitions factories, morale among all our people 
in their business and home life, as well as fighting spirit in our 
army and navy abroad. Enough religion of the right sort may 
make enough difference in morale to make all the difference between 
defeat and victory as the outcome of this war. And if in this way 
victory for the right should come as a result of religion, it would 
be not only a crowning example of the short an-d preferred method 
of divine providence; it would be, literally speaking, victory by 
the Grace of God. 

In any case, the situation for the Western Allies is such that 
neither faith without works nor works without faith can accom- 
plish what waits to be done. There must be, if we would win, faith 
and works together. 

Before leaving this topic of God and history, a word may be 
said on the question of what, on this interpretation of providence, 
we may expect to be the final outcome of this war for the future 
of the race. Will the result be more harm than good, or more 
good than harm? It is very certain that the war will need to be 
the occasion of an immense amount of good to balance up to the 
race the evils that have been involved in it thus far and that will 
be involved in its prolongation. Much possible evil will be avoided 
if the immoral Prussian militaristic ideal is finally crushed. More- 
over, there will be the tendency for humanity to learn, at least tem- 
porarily and as an intellectual conviction, the undesirability of 



32 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

war and of the conditions that make for war. But attention and 
moral effort will be necessary to retain this lesson with sufficient 
impressiveness, and to put it into effect, and the best power of 
thought will be needed to determine just how this putting it into 
effect may be most fully and lastingly secured. There seems real 
danger that the human race on earth will be permanently poorer 
and worse off, spiritually and socially as well as biologically and 
economically, as a result of this nearest approach to racial suicide. 
Undoubtedly it will be so, if the nations fail to learn and to put 
into effect the lesson of the necessity of international righteous- 
ness and a just and efficient system of wo rid- government. 

It is perhaps still possible for the race to learn enough from 
this period of strife and carnage for the resultant good to out- 
balance the total evil. But even then no one would have the right 
to credit the war with having been the means of greater good than 
could have been accomplished without it. All its moral evil at any 
rate will be regrettable forever. And the only possible way of 
guaranteeing beforehand greater good than evil as an outcome 
of the war, even supposing the side of justice and liberty to be 
victorious, will be for individuals and groups so to relate them- 
selves to truth, to right and to God that flagrantly immoral inter- 
national relations will become practically impossible. The only 
safety of the race lies in an essentially Christian international 
morality, and the only adequate guarantee of this is an essen- 
tially Christian personal religion. The only failure of essential 
Christianity of which the war may fairly be regarded as evidence 
was its failure to be given an adequate trial; which means, of 
course, not a failure of Christianity as an ethical or as a religious 
system, but a failure of the human will to be adequately Christian. 



Ill 

THE CHRISTIAN HOPE IN TIMES OF WAR 

FRANK CHAMBERLIN PORTER 

Of Paul's three things that abide, hope is the one of which we are 
now most conscious of our need. Never before in our experience 
has hope been so much the center of our inner life and the heart 
of our religion. Our mood alternates between hope and depression, 
hope and fear; and we look to our religion to make hope strong, 
and turn to our sacred book to seek secure grounds and satis- 
fying expressions for our hope. We hope for the winning of the 
war. We hope for the safety and the home-coming of those we 
love. We hope for a new world-order organized to make war 
impossible, inspired by a spirit of cooperation and good will 
between classes and between nations. We hope as never before for 
an assured and abundant life after death. We put these hopes 
in some relation to each other, weighing one against another, 
subordinating one to another. And when we seek their right 
relationship and look for their ultimate grounds, we ask what 
Christianity has to say and to do about them. What is Christian 
in these hopes that are filling the mind and heart of the world.'' 
The importance of this question is very great. The future of 
the world depends on the truth and the strength of the hopes 
that now inspire and direct men's purposes and efforts. The 
future of the Christian religion turns in no small measure on its 
ability now to keep the hope of mankind high and pure, free from 
self-seeking and from material interests, and true to the ultimate 

1 reality of things, and to give this hope confidence and prevailing 

I strength. 



34 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

Christians are not at one over the question what, as Christians, 
they have a right to hope for. Most evidently is this the case 
between us and our enemy. We differ in things hoped for; and it 
is perhaps not too much to say that the truth of our hope and 
the strength of our hope constitute and measure our spiritual 
equipment for the winning of the war. The Germans are fighting 
for their hope of national expansion and domination, for their 
dream of a new world empire of the chosen and fit people of 
God. We cannot question the strength of this hope of theirs, and 
its powerful influence toward bringing itself to realization. We 
and our Allies are resisting these nationalistic and arrogant 
hopes, and are appealing to the contrary hope of an inclusive 
human brotherhood, in which good will shall prevail between 
nations, and hence right and peace. The hope that is truer, 
more in accordance with the nature of things, the nature of man, 
the will of God, and the hope that is most deeply felt and most 
loyally served, with most conviction and most sacrifice, will prevail 
in the end. That is the Jiope that will come true. Ours is inevitably 
a religious hope, for it is universal in range, big as the world, 
and needs not only every power of ours but the Power not our- 
selves to bring it about. It is for every one who holds it intensely, 
in a real sense, a hope in God and a hope for God. But is it cer- 
tain that it is also a Christian hope, a hope in Christ and a hope 
for Christ .f" 

There are, not only between us and our enemy, but among 
ourselves, radical differences as to what a Christian should hope 
for in the present world crisis. There are those who search the 
Scriptures for predictions of the Kaiser and his overthrow, and 
see in the anti-Christian philosophy and in the anti-Christian 
arrogance and cruelty of his militaristic state, a sign that the 
end of this evil world-age is near, and that Christ will come quickly 
and set up his reign on earth. And there are those to whom such 
literalism in the use of Scripture and such externality in the hope 
for Christ's coming are intellectually impossible and untrue, and 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE IN TIMES OF WAR 35 

religiously harmful. To them the meaning of the Bible is to be 
found in the tendency and spirit of its teachings, and their hope 
is for the presence and rule of the spirit of Christ and the domi- 
nance of his principles in the common life of humanity. This 
involves a radical difference in the hope of Christians for a new 
world, a new human society, and in the ways in which this hope 
will affect their motives and efforts. There are also deep-going 
differences in regard to the hope for a life 'after death. That man}'^ 
are looking eagerly for material, "scientific" proof through 
physical communications from the dead, while many, on the 
other hand, are feeling that immortality belongs to the race and 
not to the individual, and that the sacrifice of the young and the 
strong finds its only and sufficient end and justification in the 
new humanity they die to create, indicates that Christ has not 
yet brought life and immortality to clear light for humanity. 
Such differences are not to be desired. If Christianity is to be 
the religion of the present eager and pressing hopes of mankind 
and give these hopes elevation, truth, and victorious endurance 
and enthusiasm. Christians should be clear and united in the 
contents and character of their hope. 

Among these hopes of mankind there can be no doubt which 
one has the first place in the minds of the intellectual leaders 
and the actual rulers of the allied nations. Never before has a 
truly prophetic note been so clearly sounded by leading men of 
affairs, and by the press and the leaders of public opinion, as 
well as by the poets and preachers to whom prophecy naturally 
belongs. From all sides we have expressions of a hope which four 
years ago was judged to be the dream of impractical idealists, 
the hope for a new order of human life, in which good will and 
mutual cooperation shall take the place of suspicion and com- 
petitive struggle. We need not be blind to whatever motives of 
self-interest may have entered into the action of this or that one 
of our Allies in undertaking the war. The outstanding fact 
remains that while the German Government appeals to the self- 



36 RELIGION AND THE WAR 



^ 



assertion of the German State and seeks its aggrandizement 
through force at the expense of its neighbors, the allied govern- 
ments appeal to national self-sacrifice for the sake of international 
redemption. It is to this appeal on behalf of the rights, the free- 
dom, the happiness of mankind, that our soldiers respond; for 
humanity, not for national gain, that our peoples are prepared 
to give and to suffer. This hope takes concrete form in the word 
Democracy, and in the "idea of a League or Federation of free, 
democratic nations, bound together for the defense of human 
rights, for cooperation in all that concerns human welfare and 
progress, and the repression of every attack upon the peace of 
the world. So viewed the war becomes definitely a war to end war, 
and as such it is engaged in and supported by peace-loving 
peoples, against the nation that glorifies war and would per- 
petuate it. 

Is this great hope Christian.? Is Christianity the religion which 
a hope so high and so difficult needs if it is to keep its height amid 
the many influences that tend to lower it, and if it is to prove 
possible and become actual in spite of powerful forces that work 
against it.? It is not self-evident that Christianity will prove 
equal to this which is clearly the greatest task that the present 
imposes upon it. There are many who doubt its adequacy; many 
who see that it has brought division and warfare, and think it 
unfitted to create unity; many who see that it has withdrawn 
from the world, and think it unadapted to provide the moral 
principles and spiritual energies of the new social and political 
world-order. It is for us who believe in the sufficiency of Christ 
to prove that he alone provides those religious and moral prin- 
ciples and forces without which no - democracy, still less any 
federation of democracies, can stand. 

The ideal of human brotherhood which the war has revealed 
as the deepest desire and faith of men and has put before us as 
a goal that we must now set out to reach is of course old in 
its beginnings, and for a generation it has been taking ever 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE IN TIMES OF WAR 37 

stronger hold on the minds of men. Prophetic utterances of this 
ideal could be quoted in abundance. A striking example is a saying 
of Alexander Dumas in 1893: "I believe our world is about to 
begin to realize the words 'Love one another,' without, however, 
being concerned whether a man or a God uttered them. . . . 
Mankind, which does nothing moderately, is about to be seized 
with a frenzy, a madness, of love." And Tolstoy's comment on 
this at the time of the Russian revolution, in 1905 : "I believe 
that this thought, however strange the expression, 'seized with a 
frenzy of love,' may seem, is perfectly true and is felt more or 
less clearly by all men of our day. A time must come when love, 
which forms the fundamental essence of the soul, will take the 
place natural to it in the life of mankind, and will become the 
chief basis of the relations between man and man. That time is 
coming; it is at hand." 

The world war seems like a violent contradiction of the truth 
of such prophecies. It seems for the time to have made love 
inadequate as a summing up of morals and religion. We almost 
feel that the Sermon on the Mount must be kept in reserve for 
other times. The war has made love itself a hope. We renounce 
it for a time that we may resist a power that threatens to de- 
stroy it altogether and put selfishness and cruelty on the throne 
of the world. But the war has not in fact disproved the faith 
that God is love and that love is the supreme law and power 
among men. It has made mankind more conscious of its ideal of 
community and fellowship, and seems to be carrjang us faster 
toward the realization of human brotherhood than peace and 
prosperity were doing. The greatest and most widely approved 
sentences of President Wilson's war papers are those that give 
expression to "what the thinking peoples of the world desire, with 
their longing hope for justice and for social freedom and oppor- 
tunity." On the anniversary of our entering the war, Gilbert 
Murray declared that England needed our help in battle, but 
even more in upholding their true faith. "Americans instinctively 



38 RELIGION AND THE WAR i 

believe ... in freedom, peace, democracy, arbitration, and' 
international good will. . . . When the war is over there will be 
a world to rebuild, and the only principles on which to rebuild 
it are these principles." Germany denies the truth of these prin- 
ciples, but in doing so it denies human nature and derives from 
physical nature a state-ethics of struggle and the survival of 
the strong. It denies the prophet of Galilee, and looks for its 
example to Rome. Sometimes it has seemed as if the German 
denial of humanity and affirmation of material and brute force 
were in danger of justifying itself by the only test they admit, 
that of physical success. Where can we look for help toward a 
living faith in liberty and brotherhood over against the powerful 
demonstration we are offered of faith in material force and in 
the progress of nations through aggression and tyranny? We 
must look no doubt first of all to our own souls and oppose to 
the faith in physical and animal nature a faith in human nature 
and in the truth of its best instincts and ideals ; and then to those 
who know best and most worthily express the human soul and the 
reality of its spiritual possessions. Not from the Bible alone, and 
not only from Christ are such reassuring testimonies to be 
gained ; and we are not renouncing the unique value of the Chris- 
tian religion when we find that the faith and hope which it teaches 
are the faith and the hope of the universal heart of man. 

The poet laureate of England made his special contribution 
to his nation's needs in time of war in the anthology, "The Spirit 
of Man." "Our country," he says, "is called of God to stand for 
the truth of man's hope." "Truly it is the hope of man's great 
desire, the desire for brotherhood and universal peace to men of 
good will, that is at stake in this struggle." From the miseries 
and slaughter and hate of war, "we can turn," he says, "to seek 
comfort only in the quiet confidence of our souls ; and we look 
instinctively to the seers and poets of mankind, whose sayings 
are the oracles and prophecies of loveliness and loving kindness." 
They help us gain the conviction our time most needs, "that 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE IN TIMES OF WAR 39 

spirituality is the basis and foundation of human life," that 
"man is a spiritual being, and the proper work of his mind is 
to interpret the world according to his higher nature, and to 
conquer the material aspects of the world so as to bring them 
into submission to the spirit." 

But the Bible also is a witness to just these convictions and 
contains prophecies of just such hopes. Bridges includes very 
few citations from the Bible, chiefly because it is so well known, 
but also because "this familiarity implies deep-rooted associations, 
which would be likely to distort the context." Alas, for these 
associations, for the interpretations that confuse and the preju- 
dices that blind the readers of the greatest literature of spirit- 
uality and of hope which the world contains. In spite of this, 
the Bible will be looked to b}'^ multitudes for guidance and support 
in those hopes on which the future turns, while the poet's fine 
work will be prized by few. It is only too possible to fail to find 
in the Bible its testimony to that "hope of man's great desire of 
brotherhood and peace" which constitutes the most living religion 
of our time; and this failure will mean loss to the hope itself 
of its most powerful support, and loss to the Christian religion 
of contact and sympathy with the most urgent spiritual need 
and aspiration of men to-day. 

The Bible does contain various and contradictory hopes, and 
can encourage expectations that are not in accordance with the 
best conscience of our age, nor with our knowledge of the way in 
which human progress is achieved. But there is nothing more 
instructive than the relation of these different hopes to each other 
as the historian understands them and there is nothing more 
worthy and inspiring than the language in which the most 
spiritual and the most universal of these hopes are expressed. 

The original hope of the religion of Israel was that involved in 
the unique and exclusive relation between the nation Israel and 
Yahweh, its God. It was the hope of Israel's prosperity and 
power through the certain favor of Yahweh, and his intervening 



40 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

help in times of danger, most of all his help in the nation's wars. 
-These were "the Wars of Yahweh." Both the strength and the 
defect of the Old Testament religion lie in this fundamental faith, 
the peculiarity and exclusiveness of the relation between Israel i 
and its God. It inspired its early victories and created the king- f 
dom of David. It sustained the nation amid calamities and en- 
abled it to maintain itself when other small nations disappeared 
before the great world empires, and while these also came and- 
passed. It was a natural and not unreasonable faith for its time, 
so long as Yahweh was only Israel's national God, even though 
he was believed to be better and stronger than the gods of other 
nations and destined to triumph over them ; but when Israel's God 
was believed to be the one and only God of all the world the 
doctrine of Israel as his peculiar people must either lead to false 
claims and have bad effects upon temper and conduct, or else be 
reinterpreted and radically changed. Nothing can be more 
instructive as to the nature of religious hope than to follow out 
two main lines of development by which an adjustment was 
attempted between this primitive nationalism and the later, larger 
thought of God and the world. 

The great prophets before the exile, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, 
Jeremiah, and after exile Deutero-Isaiah, were those through 
whom the faith was attained that Yahweh is the one and only 
God ; and the modification of the national exclusiveness of Israel 
which they made was in the direction of its complete subordination 
to ethical and spiritual ideals. The one God of all was the God 
of righteousness, and of Israel only on the condition and for the 
end of righteousness. But an ethical in place of a national relation 
to God meant, if it was carried through consistently, a universal 
relation of God to all men as individuals, instead of a peculiar 
relation to one favored nation. Consistency was not reached, yet 
glimpses, sometimes clear momentary visions, of this individual, 
universal, ethical religion are to be found in the great prophets ; 
and in them the Old Testament religion reaches its height. It is 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE IN TIMES OF WAR 41 

the prophetic denial of national claims and hopes, not the older 
and always prevalent assertion of them, that constitutes the reality 
and truth of the Old Testament hope. It is hope for Yahweh and 
his righteousness, not for Israel and its glory. It finds its highest 
expression in such predictions as Isaiah's promise of security to 
the humble and believing; and Jeremiah's expectation of the time 
when no special revelation will make known the will of God to a 
chosen few, but when everyone will have his own inward knowl- 
edge of God ; and Ezekiel's belief that the new inward nature which 
every man requires if he is to do that will of God which he knows, 
will be achieved not only by his own free moral choice (18:31), 
but also by the divine spirit, the transforming presence and 
power of God (36: 26, 27) ; and in Deutero-Isaiah's interpretation 
of the peculiar relation of Israel to the one God of all the world 
as that of Yahweh's Servant, his prophet to all nations, who 
brings light to the heathen and deliverance from bondage, and 
who effects this ministry even through his own shame and suffer- 
ing for others' sins. 

But there was a second still later way of adjusting the original 
nationalism of Israel's faith and hope to monotheism and the 
conception of a unity in nature and histor}'^; and this proved 
easier and more popular than the other. In late prophecy and 
apocalypse the hope of Israel's national and worldly prosperity 
and power takes on an unearthly character. Instead of righteous- 
ness and spirituality as in the earlier prophets, transcendence and 
heavenliness interpret or displace the primitive hope. The heavenly 
region to which apocalyptic prophecy transferred Israel's hope 
was a refinement of the physical, but it was still essentially 
physical, a region whose riches could be as sensibly enjoyed and 
as selfishly desired as the palace and throne of an earthly king- 
dom. The heavenly powers by which this hope was to be realized 
were divine, yet they were essentially material forces. The 
prophetic hopes at their highest rest on human nature at its 
highest, on the conscience and reason of man recognized as the 



42 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

will and thought of God. But the apocalyptic hope, though it 
strains language to magnify the contrast between its two worlds, 
the earthly and the heavenly, the present and the future, does not 
succeed in making them really different. Supernaturalism always 
fails to find the real difference between man and God and so the 
way in which the difference is to be overcome. This super- 
naturalism of the apocalypse is seen also in the ways in which 
the hope is revealed. The seer interprets in literal or artful ways 
the language of prophetic scriptures regarded as divine oracles, 
or he is translated in ecstasy to heaven and shown the secrets of 
the upper world and the future. The coming of this new heavenly 
world men may pray for, and the time of its coming they may 
seek to discover from sacred writings and traditions and from 
the signs of the times, but only divine powers can bring this evil 
world to an end, and only from heaven where they already are 
can descend, in heaven's own time and wayi, the scenery and the 
actors in the last great drama of history. There is in this hope 
no strong ethical appeal, no prevailing sense that in the inward 
region of the heart and in its instincts and desires and wills, God's 
presence is to be found and his work for man experienced. More- 
over this hope for a new heavenly world means no hope for the 
present world. It is evil and must grow more evil until God inter- 
venes to destroy it and brings down from heaven the realm of 
good. To renounce the world and withdraw from it is the course 
of wisdom and holiness. As a way of adjusting Israel's national 
hope to monotheism it is not comparable with the prophetic way 
of ethics and inwardness. It is still Israel, or the true Israel, that 
is to inherit the world to come ; and at its coming the world 
empire must first of all be overthrown, for the new kingdom, 
heavenly and supernatural though it is, is enough like the kingdom 
of Greece or of Rome to require its fall and to take its place. The 
apocalyptic hope is the end of Old Testament prophecy, but not 
its height. It was no doubt in some sense fitted for its times, hard 
times, always, when the evils of life seemed irremediable. It knew 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE IN TIMES OF WAR 43 

the need of divine help, and it encouraged endurance and fidelity 
even to death. But it was not grounded in the nature of men, and 
it was mistaken in its conception of the nature of the world. It 
never quite escapes this inherent falseness and confusion in its 
fundamental assumptions. 

It cannot be hard to pass judgment on the relative value of 
these three main hopes of the Old Testament. The primitive hope 
for God's special favor to his own peculiar people who are destined 
to have dominion over all others would have seemed, before the 
war, safely outgrown by humanity. If the world still needed a 
demonstration of the danger and falsity of any nation's belief 
in its peculiar excellence and in its exclusive right and destiny 
to rule, and the intolerable morals and preposterous religion that 
finally result from such claims, the aggressors in the present war 
have supplied it, and the rest of the world is united in the resolve 
that no further demonstration of this hope be undertaken. The 
early histories of the Old Testament and parts of its laws, its 
psalms and even its prophecies, contain expressions of just this 
belief in a peculiar people, for whom God made the world, and to 
whom the right belongs, secured by the divine favor and promise, 
to rule over all other nations. Some of the inferences and conse- 
quences of this faith that now shock the world, something of the 
hatred and the cruelty toward foreign peoples, the exaltation of 
vengeance, the arrogance and the inhumanity, find unreserved 
expression in this literature. But the meaning of the Old Testa- 
ment is to be found in the denial and overcoming of this doc- 
trine and of its results. 

In regard to the two ways in which this denial and correction 
were chiefly undertaken, there can be no question where the greater 
value and truth are to be found. The prophet's criticism of the 
national hope and reinterpretation of it as the hope for righteous- 
ness really struck at the heart of the materialism and selfishness 
of the popular national hope, its false pride and its denial of 
trust and of good will toward mankind. But the apocalyptic 



44 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

modification of the older hope, though it fitted it for a wider 
view of the world and of history and a deeper experience of the 
power of evil, did not correct those moral and spiritual faults 
which were inherent in the older hope. There is no generosity, 1 
no faith in human nature, no sense of the present prevailing ' 
rule of God and power of good, no thought of the "secret of 
inwardness" and "the method of self-renouncement," in the religion 
of the apocalypse. The righteous kernel of Judaism, the holy 
few who feared the Lord, expected an invasion of divine forces 
on their behalf, the destruction of their oppressors and their own 
elevation to angel-like natures and God-like authority and 
blessedness. It could hardly be expected that they would exhibit 
Isaiah's virtue of humility, or Jeremiah's of inwardness and 
satisfaction in the communion of the soul with God, or Deuterp- 
Isaiah's impulse to turn their present lowliness to greatness by ■ 
ministry to those who persecuted them and even by death for 
others' transgressions. The greatest of the apocalypses are no 
doubt the canonical ones, Daniel and Revelation ; and they are 
great in their confidence in the divine government of the world, 
and in its final vindication, and in their assertion of the martyr 
virtues. But they do not believe in man, and in God in man, though 
their belief in a God above is heroic. They do not hope for the 
world, or find God in the world; nor do they feel that they are 
in any sense responsible for the evil of the world and for its 
salvation from evil. Righteousness and blessedness belong only to 
heaven, and can come only from heaven to earth, and only by an 
act of God which will bring the present world to a sudden end. 
The faults of materialism and of self-interest which belong to 
the naive nationalism of Israel's beginnings are still present in 
the conscious and sophisticated other-worldliness of the apoca- 
lyptic hopes, and reveal the inner untruth of a supernaturalism 
which reckons in terms of place and time, and looks above and 
ahead instead of about and within for the Kingdom of God. 

The post-canonical apocalypses of Judaism fall within the 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE IN TIMES OF WAR 45 

period beginning with the attempt of Antiochus IV to make the 
Jews Greeks, and the successful resistance of the Maccabees and 
their establishment of an independent Jewish kingdom, and ending 
with the Jewish-Roman wars, the destruction of Jerusalem and 
the suppression by Hadrian of the final Messianic, political 
uprising under Bar Cochba; that is, from 168 B, C. to 135 A. D. 
It is of the highest importance to note that Christianity took its 
rise in the midst of this period, and that the apocalyptic hopes 
which these events encouraged and which in turn partly shaped 
the events, formed the immediate environment and inheritance of 
the new religion. The question as to the nature of the hope of the 
New Testament becomes therefore largely the question of the 
place which Jewish apocalyptical expectations had in the new 
religion and in the mind of its founder. 

There are three elements in the hope of the New Testament 
which are found in the later Jewish apocalypses, but not in the 
Old Testament: 1. The coming of the Son of Man as judge of 
men and angels at the last day, which is always thought to he 
near at hand. 2. The reign on earth of Messiah and his saints, 
the living and the risen dead, for a certain period, during which 
they will overcome all the powers of evil. 3. The immortality of 
the spirit, the transformation of the righteous into angelic 
natures, fitting them to be companions of heavenly beings in the 
final consummation. For our understanding of these hopes and 
for our decision as to their truth and value it is necessary to look 
at them as they arise in Jewish writings and not only in their 
appearance in the New Testament. 

The Son of Man appears first in Daniel, but there he is not an 
individual, but the symbol of a nation, "the people of the saints 
of the Most High" ; and the vision pictures Israel as coming on 
a cloud, not from heaven, but to God, to receive from him 
authority to rule over the world. It is first in a part of the Book 
of Enoch, the "Parables," chapters 37-71, dating probably from 
the reign of Herod, that Daniel's "Son of Man" becomes an 



46 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

individual. It is important to understand the religion of this 
writer in order to appreciate the significance of this heavenly 
Messiah, His religion consists in faith in the reality of a spiritual 
world which is destined to displace the present world and to be 
the blessed abode of the righteous. God is "the Lord of Spirits," 
and the voice of Isaiah's seraphim becomes, "Holy, holy, holy, is 
the Lord of Spirits: he filleth the earth with spirits." The sin 
of the kings and mighty of the earth is that they deny the Lord 
of Spirits and the hidden dwelling places of the righteous. This 
is a religion of faith in heaven and its God and its angelic inhabit- 
ants, and in the destiny of the righteous soon to share its beauty 
and blessedness. Among those whom Enoch sees there, one is above 
all significant for man. He has the appearance of a man, with a 
face of graciousness and beauty, like an angel's. He is described 
as the Son of Man to whom righteousness and wisdom belong. He 
has existed from before the creation, and has been revealed to the 
righteous. Faith in him and hope for his coming have sustained 
the righteous in times of trouble, and by faith in him and in the 
Lord of Spirits and the heavenly dwelling places, they "have 
hated and despised the world of unrighteousness and have hated 
all its works and ways." Here is a religion of pure other-worldli- 
ness. The calling of this heavenly Son of Man is to be the judge 
of the world at the last day. He will then "sit on the throne of 
his glory," will "choose the righteous and holy" from among the 
risen dead, will condemn and send away to destruction the kings 
and mighty of the earth, who because of their unbelief in the 
unseen world have been proud and worldly and unjust. The 
righteous will dwell in the new heaven and earth, with the Lord 
of Spirits over them and the Son of Man as their companion, 
having been clothed with garments of glory and immortal life. 
The likeness between this religion and the apocalyptic type of 
New Testament Christianity is striking. But it is not Christian 
because it is without Jesus himself. This Son of Man has not 
already come and lived among men. The righteous have not 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE IN TIMES OF WAR 47 

learned of him that God is in this world as well as in the other, 
that he is a God of human beings, even the lowliest, and of birds 
and grass, of rain and growth. They have not learned that good 
is already stronger than evil ; least of all do they know the greatest 
thing, that love is supreme, and that not by hating the world 
and its ways but by the ministry of love is the new world to be 
brought in. The religion of Enoch presents in pure and simple 
form, in pre-Christian Judaism, just that religion of dualism and 
pessimism, of despair of the present and the renunciation of effort 
to better the world, of strained expectation of divine intervention, 
which sometimes, and even now in some quarters, claims to be 
the only true Christianity. It is, in fact, Christianity with Christ 
left out. 

The second element which the apocalypses add to the hope 
of the Old Testament and which the New Testament Apocalypse 
adopts, is the conception of a millennial earthly kingdom. This 
appears in probably an earlier part of Enoch, chapters 91-104. 
In a short Apocalypse of Weeks, after seven weeks of world- 
history up to the writer's present, an eighth week is predicted, in 
which the righteous shall wield the sword against their oppressors 
and establish the Messianic kingdom; then a ninth week in which 
the preaching of judgment to come will convert all men to 
righteousness; finally, a tenth week of final judgment against all 
angelic powers of evil, ending with a new heaven and an eternity 
of blessedness. 

It is not only the fact that here and elsewhere these two hopes 
are proved to be Jewish, not Christian, in origin, that influences 
our judgment on them when they reappear in the New Testament ; 
it is also the understanding of them which their Jewish form 
makes possible. They are two forms of adjusting the old national 
and earthly hope of Israel to a new, more universal and tran- 
scendent form of faith and hope. In the religion of the "Parables" 
of Enoch the transcendent practically transforms and displaces 
the earthly. In the millennial scheme, the heavenly follows the 



48 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

earthly in time. Resurrection enables some of the dead to have 
part in the earthly, while translation into angel-like, immortal 
natures fits men for the final heavenly life. The understanding of 
the origin and purpose of these hopes makes it unnatural and 
irrational to regard them as literal disclosures of the unseen! 
world and of future events. 

The third hope which Judaism added to what its sacred i 
scriptures contained was the hope for immortality of the spirit.! 
It happens that this also appears earliest in Judaism in the Book 
of Enoch (especially chapters 102-104). Enoch solemnly assures 
his readers that he has seen it written in heavenly books that joy 
and glory are prepared for the spirits of those who have died in 
righteousness. This is not a resurrection of the body to enable 
one to have a share in the earthly kingdom, but a transformation 
which fits men for the realm of spirits. 

When we turn in the light of the older hopes to the New Testa- 
ment and ask what are the hopes that belong properly to Chris- 
tianity, knd how are they related to the present hopes of the 
world, we meet the problem presented by the importance of 
properly apocalyptical expectations in the first Christian com- 
munity. The case is something like that which meets us in the Old 
Testament, and we have here no less than there to distinguish 
and to choose. The hope of the early Christian community was 
no doubt first of all for the physical coming of Christ and the 
establishment of his kingdom; but there developed also within 
the New Testament period two movements away from this, one in 
an ethical and spiritual direction, and the other toward emphasis 
on the individual life after death. The first of these is more char- 
acteristic of the New Testament religion than the other. It is the 
tendency of Paul to emphasize the present inward experience of 
Christ, and the transforming power of his spirit more than the 
hope of his eoming, though he receives this from primitive Chris- 
tianity and does not doubt its literal and early fulfilment. It is, 
I believe, beyond question that Paul's Christian hope is chiefly, 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE IN TIMES OF WAR 49 

as Royce has argued, the hope for a new humanity created by the 
spirit of Christ, which is the spirit of love. This is in a measure 
already experienced. Christ dwells in the Christian and makes 
him a center and source of love. His spirit breaks down barriers 
and ends divisions. Unity and peace are its effects. Through this 
one, present spirit of Christ. each man becomes a distinct but 
essential member of the new body; and Paul's greatest hope is 
for the completion of this unification of man in mutual helpful- 
ness and brotherhood. Paul attests also the other tendency away 
from the outward future coming of Christ to the hope for a life 
with Christ and like Christ's after death. This eternal life with 
Christ is also experienced by Paul as in some real sense present. 
The indwelling spirit of Christ is already transforming the 
Christian into his own immortal nature. In the Johannine writings 
these two tendencies of hope away from the apocalyptic toward 
the spiritual go still further. The Christ in whom the Christian 
now abides creates a distinctive unity among his disciples, a love 
one to another which the world has not known; and at the same 
time the experience of this present Christ is already the possession 
of eternal life. According to this which we might call the 
prophetic in distinction from the apocalyptic hope of the New 
Testament the new world of human unity in love and cooperation 
is to be brought about not only by the present spirit of Christ, 
but also by the moral choice and endeavor of man. It is through 
human love that the divine love works, and the rule of God is 
present so far as men overcome evil and create good. And even 
the immortal life is not solely a hope in God, but is to be attained 
by each soul here and now through its choice of the will of God 
and in the degree of its moral oneness with God. 

That which most concerns us is no doubt the qiiestion which 
of these hopes, the eschatological or the ethical and inward, was 
held and taught by Christ. My own conviction is that the new 
and distinct hope, the spiritual, belongs to him and proceeds from 
him, and not the familiar Jewish apocalyptic. Two opinions 



50 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

stand in the way of this judgment; two opposite types of liter- 
alism in Biblical interpretation. Dogmatic literalism accepts 
scripture throughout, and refuses to distinguish between higher 
and lower, between truth and error, in what is written. In regard 
to hope, this view leads to great stress on prediction and fulfil- 
ment. The assumption is that the Biblical predictions that have 
not been fulfilled will come to pass in the future. This is precisel}' 
a fundamental assumption of the apocalypse. It is solely upon this 
conception of scripture that many devout Christians rest their 
expectations of the outward coming of Christ and his thousand- 
year reign on earth, just as the same idea of Biblical predictions 
leads orthodox Jews to expect that Jerusalem will be the capital 
and Israel the ruling nation of the world. This literalism stands 
in the way of the world's present acceptance of Christianity as 
the religion of its highest hopes. 

But there is a like danger in the opposite literalism of the 
historian. We have already seen how the history of Jewish hopes 
makes the literal acceptance of similar New Testament hopes 
unnatural if not impossible. The literalism of the historian is, 
of course, to us true and immediately helpful in liberating us 
from bondage to the letter of an ancient book. It leaves us free 
to apply our own reason and conscience and experience to the 
interpretation of our own life and times. It turns us back upon 
our own souls, upon our faith, our desire, our will, to unveil and 
shape the future. But the historian is in danger of doing less than 
justice to the ethical and spiritual contents of the hopes of the 
Bible because of his very love of truth and willingness to sacrifice 
his wishes to it. The unpardonable sin to him is the modernizing of 
an ancient writing because of reverence for it, and the effort to 
find in it what he likes rather than things outgrown and unwel- 
come. This conscientious fear, I cannot but believe, has resulted 
in a one-sided interpretation of the New Testament, especially 
the teachings of Jesus and of Paul, as essentially apocalyptic in 
contents and spirit, and a hesitation to recognize the essentially 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE IN TIMES OF WAR 51 

inward, rational and ethical quality, the prophetic character of 
the New Testament as a whole, and to make due allowance for 
the ease and naturalness with which the current apocalyptic ideas 
of early Jewish Christians could persist and be applied to Jesus 
and attributed to him. 

This problem over which New Testament scholars are divided 
into two groups or tendencies is of course much too complicated 
to discuss here. But it is necessary at least to point out that there 
is a danger in the historian's anxiety to be without prejudice, 
and to view the past as past. The greatness of great men and 
great books is to be found in the eternal meaning, not in the mere 
form, of what they say. Historians no less than other men have 
the right and duty to ask in what direction an ancient teacher 
is looking, toward what goal the movement of his mind is tending, 
what final effects he produced, what therefore he would think 
and say if he lived in our time. We are told that it is unhistorical 
to seek in the New Testament for "the modern liberal Christ" ; 
but it is not unhistorical to look for the human beneath the 
Jewish, the eternal and universal within the temporary and 
limited. The mind of Christ, his manner and mood, his quality, 
his spirit, is not less a historical reality than his literal words. 
This is of course true also of Paul, and, in his measure, of every 
man. 

There can be no doubt that like the great prophets before him 
Jesus was chiefly a critic and corrector of the hopes of his time. 
He did not approve the national hopes that had been kindled by 
the Maccabean kingdom and were soon to issue in the suicidal 
revolt against Rome. Whether Jesus expected the speedy coming 
of the Son of Man and the end of the world, and whether he 
identified himself with this transcendent Messiah-eTudge, are 
questions made difficult, not by our wishes, but by the nature of 
the evidence. My own inclination is, at this point, to attribute 
more to the influence of Jewish expectations on the gospel tradi- 
tions than to Jesus' own words. What seems to me certain is that 



52 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

the bearing of the teaching of Jesus was in the direction of the 
spiritual hopes of Paul and John rather than the apocalyptic 
hopes which they still held in common with the first disciples. 

It is the fundamental principle of the apocalyptic hope that 
God made not one world but two (II Esdras T: 50). This world 
must end and the other world must come if evil is to end and good- 
prevail. But Jesus believed that this world is already God's world' 
and that in it good is already stronger than evil. The Kingdom 
of God is indeed still to come, but it is already within. It is already 
upon us when by the spirit of God evil is cast out. It has been said 
that it was the Greeks who believed in one world in contrast to 
the Jews who believed in two ; and that Poseidonius, the Platonic 
Stoic, an oriental, of the century before Christ, wrote to make 
men at home in the universe. But it is surely not a mistake to 
say that Jesus felt at home in the world and meant to make others 
at home. This is precisely the meaning of the word Father, of 
which Paul testifies that Jesus' use was to a Jew new, and that it 
meant freedom from mental bondage and fear. Poseidonius made 
men feel at home in the universe by denying the existence of evil, 
which is of course one way of making one world out of two ; 
Jesus by affirming the reality of a goodness in God and in man 
capable of conquering evil. That God is Father, the Father of 
all men, even, and especially, of sinners, is not the basis' of an 
apocalyptic hope. Jesus did not chiefly foretell the end of the 
world through the catastrophic intervention of God or of the 
Son of Man. He did chiefly teach that the power not ourselves 
is fatherly, that it is human, that we can trust our own souls 
at their best to teach us the nature of God, that our highest 
human values are the ultimate realities of the universe. Jesus 
found that the chief fears and hopes of men were concerned with 
bodily welfare and possessions and with power over others. Mam- 
mon and dominion were the false gods men worshipped. Wealth and 
power seem now the objects of the hope and the religious devotion 
of the Central Powers. Jesus declared that it is the heathen who 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE IN TIMES OF WAR 53 

are anxious about food and raiment. It is the heathen who lord 
it over their fellow men. Not so was it to be among his disciples. 
Since the Father knows our needs and wills to give good things, 
since the outer world belongs to him and since 'the things of the 
soul are of the greater value, we men are free to put first things 
first, to seek God's Kingdom and righteousness. And since God's 
rule consists in love and in doing good, without reserve or regard 
for deserts or for returns, the only real rulership among men 
also must be the renunciation of rulership for the sake of min- 
istry. Not to be masters over others, not to be strong by making 
others weak, but to serve and to give is the divine plan, the real 
nature of things. This is not what the war lords learn from 
physical and animal nature as to the way to success and primacy, 
but it is true to that human nature to which they do violence. 
The Christian hope is therefore not for material possessions nor 
I for authority and power ; it is that spiritual realities shall vindi- 
; cate and make effectual their preeminence, and shall master matter 
! and all outward things for their own ends ; and that unselfish love 
, shall measure greatness among men and shall destroy hatred and 
fear and create a human family, 

I If this, according to Christ, is the Christian hope, then Chris- 
j tianity is certainly the religion for the present hope of the world. 
The hope of a league of free nations, of a federated world in which 
democracy is safe, is clearly seen by those who see best what it 
involves and what obstacles stand in its way to be first of all the 
I hope for a new spirit among men, a new inward temper, a new 
I will; it is also seen to be something universal in its range. Not 
I again one league against another, but a league that at least aims 
I at being inclusive of humanity. Spirituality and universality, 
inwardness and good-will, belong to the hope that is now inspiring 
the nations ; and these are just the marks of the religion of Christ ; 
they are what Matthew Arnold called the method of inwardness 
I and the secret of self-renouncement, controlled by the mildness 
land sweet reasonableness of Christ; reverence for the soul, mean- 



54 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

ing both the preeminent worth of every individual and the primacy 
in each of the things of the soul ; and among these the chief great- 
ness and God-likeness of love. However one attempts to sum up the 
religion of Jesus it is sure to mean in the end the same two things 
which the world now sees to be its great needs and the ground 
and heart of its hope. 

It would be tragic indeed if Christianity should lose its supreme 
opportunity by failing to lead and inspire this newly emerging 
and Christ-like hope of men. It can fail if it confuses itself in the 
details of Biblical predictions, if it becomes involved in apoca- 
lyptic fancies. It can fail if in reaction against these and under 
the influence of an equally literalistic criticism men turn from 
the Bible altogether as a book of the past. 

The men of our time are shaping the hope of a united and 
friendly human family of free peoples, united not only against 
war but for all kinds of mutual help and cooperative progress ; 
and the Bible, the prophets of the Old Testament, Jesus and Paul 
in the New, are the chief creative sources of just such hopes. 
These hopes must have religion beneath them if they are to endure 
and be realized in spite of their powerful foes, the fears and 
hatreds which materialism and selfishness create. And Christianity 
is the only religion which has the quality and the right to meet 
this need. 

The Christian hope is also the hope of immortality; and just 
now the reality and power of this hope are put to the test. Paul, 
who knew how far Judaism had gone toward faith in the eternal 
life of the spirit, testifies that it was only as a Christian and 
because of Christ that this hope had become to him a certainty, 
almost a present experience. The nature of God as Christ knew 
him, and the nature of man's sonship to God, carry immortality 
with them as an inward and immediate assurance. God is not the 
God of the dead, but of the living. Plere again the Christian 
religion has an opportunity and an obligation in times of war. 
Men are seeking assurance of life to come for those who have 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE IN TIMES OF WAR 55 

given their lives for human right and liberty. It is not to be 
desired that this pressing religious need of our day should turn 
to physical evidences, to messages from the dead through abnormal 
experiences and dubious agencies. The Christian faith in immor- 
tality is to be experienced as faith in the God who loves as a 
father, and who gives as love must give his best to his children. 
If God is love, then our love does not deceive us. If God is spirit, 
then our spirits are from God and will return to him. If the soul, 
the person, is of supreme worth and reality, then it will not be 
involved in the body's destruction, nor lost as a drop in the ocean 
or as a breath in the wind, either in the divine being from whom 
it came, or in the human race, "the beloved community," to which 
its service is given. * 

It is perhaps in the relation to each other of the hope for a 
new human brotherhood and the hope for the life of the soul with 
God, that the distinction and preeminence of the religion of Jesus 
come most clearly to light. He feels no need of sacrificing one to 
the other, but holds his hope for this world and the oneness of 
men in love side by side with the hope for the other world. He 
does call upon individuals to give their lives in ministry to others, 
but in the losing of lifeiie declares that life is gained. Paradoxes 
express his faith and insight, and the nature of love in God and 
in man brings with it the key to the solution of the paradox. 

The Christian hopes for a new human brotherhood on earth 
and for the immortality of the individual are involved, and their 
principles given, in the simple and profound sayings of Jesus, 
and no other testimony as to their nature and certainty can be 
compared with his. To no other words is the response of our own 
spirits so instant and sure. Blessed are the poor in spirit, the 
meek, the merciful, the pure in heart: theirs is the kingdom of 
heaven ; they shall see God. Love your enemies, that ye may be 
sons of your Father. Ye shall be perfect as your heavenly Father 
is perfect. Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth. Ye 
cannot serve God and mammon. Be not anxious for your life what 



56 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body what 
ye shall put on. Is not the life more than food and the body than 
raiment? Behold the birds of the heaven . . . Are not ye of 
much more value than they? Your Father knoweth that ye have 
need of all these things. But seek ye his kingdom and righteous- 
ness. Be not afraid of them that kill the body. The very hairs of 
your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore. If 3'^e being evil 
know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more 
shall your Father give good things to them that ask him. All 
things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even so 
do ye also unto them. Not every one that saith unto me, Lord . . . 
but he that doeth the will of my Father. Freely ye have received, 
freely give. It is more blessed to give than to receive. He that 
findeth his life shall lose it : and he that loseth his life for my sake 
shall find it. I thank thee. Father . . . that thou hast hid these 
things from the wise . . . and revealed them unto babes. Except 
ye turn and become as little children ye shall in no wise enter into 
the kingdom of heaven. Forbid them not . . . for to such be- 
longeth the kingdom of heaven. What shall a man be profited if 
he shall gain the whole world and forfeit his life? It is hard for 
the Tich man to enter into the kingdom of God. Keep yourselves 
from all covetousness : for a man's life consisteth not in the 
abundance of the things which he possesseth. The rulers of the 
Gentiles lord it over them, . . . but whosoever would be great 
among you shall be your minister; and whosoever would be first 
among you shall be your servant. Render unto Csesar the things 
that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's. Inas- 
much as ye did it unto one of the least of these my brethren ye 
did it unto me. Nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt. Father, 
forgive them, for they know not what the}'^ do. 

Here is the Christian hope ; here its grounds and motives ; here 
rather than in apocalyptic foretellings of the coming of the Son 
of Man and the near end of the world. Here is an anthology of 
testimonies to the faith which a world at war to end war most 



THE CHRISTIAN HOPE IN TIMES OF WAR 57 

needs, that man is a spiritual being and that his proper work is 
"to interpret the world according to his higher nature," and to 
bring the material aspects of the world into subjection to the ' 
spirit. Other "oracles and prophecies of loveliness and loving- 
kindness" in the Bible and in the world's literature have their 
abiding worth, but no othef- of "the seers and poets of mankind" 
reach humanity so- widely and none so deeply. 

Certain marks and tests of the Christian hope come clearly 
into view in these characteristic sayings of Jesus. It is a hope 
not imposed upon the mind by the outward authority of a book 
or even of Christ himself, but one that appeals to conscience. 
Our spirit answers to it, and our answer is not only the consent 
of the mind but the disclosure of character and the choice of the 
will. It is a hope for which we cannot merely wait, for we are 
ourselves challenged to bring it to realization. The Christian 
hope is fundamentally inward, and is always in part already 
experienced. Paul and John knew the mind of Christ in this 
striking quality of it better than later generations. The spirit 
of God is already a love that creates unity and fellowship among 
men; and it is already the presence and power of divine and 
eternal life. The Christian hope unites the community and the 
individual, and contains the clue to the mystery that now ob- 
scures our minds. We know that the ruthless sacrifice of indi- 
viduals for the abstract idol called the State is a denial of Christ's 
reverence for the human personality. But we know also that the 
devotion of the soldier's life to the cause of human liberty and 
right, to the destruction of the idol of nationality and the 
creation of the ideal brotherhood of man, is in accordance with 
that giving of life for many which Jesus taught, and is that loss 
which is the true finding of life. The Christian hope is too inward 
and too secure to depend on outward success. The doctrine of 
physical force is judged by physical success, but not the doctrine 
of love. Yet though superior to outward fortune, the hope of 
Christ is certain of ultimate vindication, because it is hope in 



58 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

God. It is a hope according to Christ, and for Christ's coming 
as the ruling spirit in the life of humanity. But if it is a hope for 
Christ, if it is Christ's hope for the coming Kingdom of God, it 
is a hope for radical change, and for the sacrifice of our preju- 
dices and customs, our personal wishes and our material 
advantage. 

The hope for a new world-order which is the most significant 
spiritual event of our age, requires religion if it is to maintain 
itself and work powerfully for its own realization. For it is the 
hope for a purified human nature as well as for a changed human 
organization. Christianity is the chief source of this hope, and 
is summoned to prove itself equal to the task of keeping the hope 
high and giving it inward energy and resource. But it will require 
boldness of faith and the spirit of sacrifice, a sense of the excel- 
lence and worth of spiritual things, and willingness to trust our 
own souls and the souls of our fellow men, to trust ourselves to 
the instincts and ways of a Christ-like love, if the Christian hope 
is to prove able to create a new world. 



IV 
NON-RESISTANCE: CHRISTIAN OR PAGAN? 

BENJAMIN WISNER BACON 

All forms of peace propaganda are at present justh'^ and prop- 
erly repressed by the Government as a war measure. This has 
served in some degree to silence the voice of the pacifist, but mani- 
festly it cannot serve to quiet the disturbed feeling in the minds 
of many Christians, that to engage in war under any conditions 
is to come short of the idealism of Jesus. Forcible measures pro- 
duce the reverse effect, if any. 

Non-resistance, under some circumstances and conditions if not 
under all, is a duty which Jesus undeniably taught. Moreover, his 
conduct was fully in accord with his principles ; otherwise his 
following could not have maintained their unparalleled loyalty to 
him. The manifest inconsistency between these non-resistance 
sayings (taken by themselves) and the method advocated and used 
by our Government in defence of democracy and righteousness 
remains ever present. The grave extent of its inroads upon the 
national morale may be judged by the circulation attained by a 
typical pacifistic book, whose principal basis of argument is noth- 
ing else than these non-resistance sayings, and which if it does 
not attempt to square them in all cases with the conduct of Jesus, 
but rather accords to Buddha, Confucius, and Lao-tse the merit 
of greater consistency, nevertheless owes all its real effect to the 
fact that its author speaks as a well-known and authorized ex- 
ponent of Christian teaching, and leaves in his readers' minds the 
conviction not of the alleged inconsistency, but of an absolute 



60 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

and unqualified doctrine of non-resistance as supported by both 
the teaching and the conduct of Jesus. 

The single year 1915-1916 witnessed the appearance of no 
less than five successive editions of the book entitled "New Wars 
for Old," by Rev, John Haynes Holmes, and its propaganda of 
absolute and unconditional non-resistance was certainly not with- 
out effect in the military cantonments, if not among the public 
at large where its influence is less easy to trace. Recently the 
Government itself has given public and official warning against 
this type of pacifistic propaganda; and there is only too much 
reason to believe that (quite without the intention or knowledge 
of its authors) those eminent pacifists, the Potsdam conspirators, 
have made large financial contributions to its success. 

"New Wars for Old" may be taken as representative. It is the 
best example of its type. It seems to be the most effective. At 
all events, it gives concrete and tangible form to that interpreta- 
tion of the teaching of Jesus which we regard as misleading and 
dangerous ; it may therefore well form our starting-point toward 
the attainment of another interpretation, truer at once to his- 
torical fact and to the ethical sense of the religious-minded. 
Recognizing the need for meeting present conditions of the public 
mind by other than merely repressive measures we may frankly 
face the question raised in Dr. Holmes' book, whether the doctrine 
of absolute and unqualified non-resistance, traced by him to more 
than one revered teacher of pre-Christian paganism, is indeed 
identical with that of Jesus ; or whether, with Israel's Messianic 
hope, some new factor enters in, to differentiate the Biblical ideal. 

Isaiah and Jesus are for this champion of pacifism — and doubt- 
less for others — the two supreme "exemplars of non-resistance," 
and the eloquence with which his thesis is maintained might well 
win an assent which would not be granted were account taken of 
his authority to pronounce upon questions of historical criticism. 
However, few Americans, competent to form a moral judgment 
of their own, will hold in light esteem the authority of Isaiah and 



NON-RESISTANCE: CHRISTIAN OR PAGAN? 61 

Jesus. We therefore accept the exemplars at the risk of seeing 
our native hue of resolution all sicklied o'er with this pale cast 
of thought. But is their teaching justly and fairl}^ interpreted.? 
That is the question to which we now address ourselves. 



" 'Resist not evil,' means never resist, never oppose violence." 
Such is the motto, quoted from Tolstoy, with which our propa- 
gandist heads his pages. As he cites no other scholar, critic, or 
interpreter of the Sermon on the Mount, in support of this decla- 
ration of the meaning, the inference is perhaps allowable that the 
reader is expected to endow Tolstoy with a credit for scientific 
attainments in the difficult field of historical criticism and inter- 
pretation equally great with that which all men gladly accord to 
his noble disposition and sincere humanity. Whether authority 
as convincing can be cited for the contention that Buddha and 
Lao-tse taught the same doctrine of absolute non-resistance we 
are not competent to say. It seems at least to be beautifully 
expressed in the saying quoted from Buddha: 

With mercy and forbearance shalt thou disarm every foe. For want of 
fuel the fire expires: mercy and forbearance bring violence to naught. 

What Christian will deny the Christ-likeness of this teaching.'' 
What reader of the Old Testament will not hasten to add with 
Paul from Jewish "wisdom" : 

If'thine enemy hunger feed him^ if he thirst give him drink; for by so 
doing thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head.-*^ 

If, indeed, the duty in question be that of forbearance, all great 
religious teachers, whether of Christian or pre-Christian times, 
will be at one. "Hymns of hate" are unknown to the ritual of any 
religion, unless it be the ultra-modern of Prussian militarism. 
One must go to Nietzsche before attaining to the gospel that it 
is virtuous to have a giant's strength and use it like a giant. 
iRom. 12:20, citing Prov. 25:21-22. 



62 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

Teachers such as Buddha and Lao-tse may well have added to the 
well-nigh universal religious tenet of mercy, forgiveness, forbear- 
ance, the further doctrine of consistent, unqualified non-resistance. 
We accept it for the obvious reason that their systems of thought, 
which are philosophies rather than religions, contain (so far as 
the present writer is aware) no principle of active, but only of 
passive obligation. The chief end of man is for them not to ■ 
achieve, in loyal service to the Creator's ideal, but to abstain and 
refrain, to put the brakes on life, and to teach others to do the 
like. According to the author of "New Wars for Old," Buddha and 
Lao-tse lived up to their gospel of non-resistance. Contrariwise, 
"The Nazarene had his inconsistent moments like the rest of us," 
and showed it at this point. Our propagandist is too honest to 
palter with the quibble of Adin Ballou, who in his "Christian Non- 
Resistance" argues that Jesus in cleansing the temple may have 
driven the money-changers from the courtyard, but that there 
is no evidence that he struck any one of them. With such apolo- 
getic special pleading he has no patience, preferring to give the 
act of Jesus its full weight in the following straightforward 
words : 

What we have here is a well-authenticated violation of the principle 
of non-resistance — and why not accept it as such? The episode is 
chiefly remarkable in the life of the Nazarene, not for anything which 
it teaches in itself, but for its inconsistency with the rest of his career. 
Never at any other time, so far as we know, did he precipitate riot 
or himself assault his enemies. But this time he did — this time he 
failed to live up to the inordinately exacting demands of his own gospel 
of brotherhood. Nor is the circumstance at all difficult to understand! 
Jesus came to Jerusalem tired, worn, hunted. He knew that he 
walked straight into the arms of his enemies, and undoubtedly there- 
fore straight to his own death. Weary, desperate, confused, he came 
to the temple to pray — and here, right before the altars of his God, 
were the money-changers — here in the sacred places, the type and I 
symbol of that commercialized religion which he most abhorred, and 
which he knew was certain in the end to destroy him. What wonder 



NON-RESISTANCE: CHRISTIAN OR PAGAN? 63 

that a mighty flood of anger surged up in his soul^ and for the moment 
overwhelmed him. 

In short, the weary Jesus was so irritated by the unexpected ( ?) 
sight of the traders, that he threw to the winds not only his prin- 
ciples, but the dictates of the most ordinary prudence, giving his 
enemies not only their desired opportunity, but provoking the 
issue at just the point where he himself had been betrayed into the 
violation of his own teaching. Verily, great is the insight of the 
modern psychologist. To the observer of the phenomena of petu- 
lance an incident like the cleansing of the temple is "easy to under- 
stand." The scientific imagination required is easily attained. 
One acquires it by observing the irritability of tired children. 
How needless, then, to inform oneself as to the historical condi- 
tions which made this great symbolic act of the Galilean prophet 
full of meaning to every patriot Jew that witnessed it. How 
needless to raise the question why every one of our four evangelists 
should report the act and give it the prominence they do. For 
our evangelists record it reluctantly, minimizing its political 
significance and its insurrectionary flavor. They naturally dis- 
liked to give color of justice to Pilate's judicial murder, and to 
Jewish denunciations of the new religion as a rebellion against 
established authority. 

Let us then take as our point of departure this admitted "in- 
consistency." It is not historical interpretation, but the subjec- 
tive variety sometimes self-designated "psychological" which finds 
it "easy" to set aside the representation of the oldest and most 
reliable of our sources, that Jesus was not "weary, desperate, con- 
fused," and was not in the least taken unawares, when he drove 
the traders from the temple ; but that he planned his coup de main 
with careful deliberation. The evening before, saj^s Mark, "he 
entered the temple and looked round upon all things." Jesus was 
not unaware of the conditions he would find, for they were an abuse 
as notorious as hateful to every right-minded Israelite. This even 
the Talmud attests. He was not a hunted fugitive seeking asylum 



64 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

at the altar. On the contrary, for weeks past he had set his face 
steadfastly to go to Jerusalem and there lift up the standard of 
the Son of David. The initiative was his. He had planned a new 
campaign for his ideal, the Kingdom of God, a campaign no 
longer of mere teaching but of action, and he was now carrying it 
to the very seat of hostile power. Long since, probably before 
he left Galilee, he had planned this very act, a challenge to the 
corrupt priestly control of his Father's house, an act as full of 
meaning and as deliberate as Luther's nailing of his theses to the 
church doors of Wittenberg. 

And when the blow had been struck Jesus stood courageously 
by it. He met the inevitable demand of the hierocracy, "By what 
authority doest thou these things.'^" with a counter demand. 
Whence had the Baptist authority to inaugurate his prophetic 
reform, making ready for Jehovah a purified people prepared for 
his coming.^ The Sanhedrin evaded this counter demand, and 
answered only (as Jesus had foreseen they would) by secret de- 
nunciation of him to Pilate. But Pilate understood the case. We 
have the Roman governor's official interpretation of its signifi- 
cance in a certain superscription written aloft in Hebrew and 
Greek and Latin on the gibbet of an insurrectionist. This, too, 
Jesus seems to have foreseen. 

All this was not a mere "episode." It was the culminating effort 
and crisis of Jesus' career, and richly rewards a just under- 
standing. We are told that it was "inconsistent with the rest 
of Jesus' career." His mission, we infer, was to be a rabbi. His 
attempt at active leadership in achieving the Kingdom he 
preached was an unfortunate aberration. He should not have 
tried to be "the Christ," and thereby incurred a needless martyr- 
dom. The cross is still a stumblingblock. 

Strange that the evangelists who omit so much, who would 
have so strong a motive for omitting this particular "inconsis- 
tency" no less for their Master's good name than for the safety 
of the Church, should one and all record it. The disposition to 



NON-RESISTANCE: CHRISTIAN OR PAGAN? 65 

minimize everything savoring of political action on Jesus' part is 
very marked in all our evangelists, for obvious reasons. To the 
evidences of this belong, for example, Mark's denial, and the 
fourth evangelist's explanation, of the saying about destroying ' 
the temple, together with the latter's description of the whip "of 
small cords" as Jesus' only weapon in the purging of the temple." 
Are we then to admit the "inconsistency" — not casual and inci- 
dental, as conceived in this pacifistic interpretation, but deliberate 
and flagrant.^ Or may we perhaps now raise the question whether 
the "inconsistency" is not rather chargeable to the interpreter's 
account ? 

The interpretation with which we are dealing makes the teach- 
ing of Jesus regarding the use of force identical with the non- 
resistance doctrine of Buddha and Lao-tse. On the other hand, 
it very justly relates it to that of the great prophet of the Davidic 
kingdom of righteousness and peace, Isaiah, the son of Amoz. 
From the point of view of the historical critic the relation of 
Jesus' teaching to that of Isaiah is absolutely sound. But the 
effect of this relation is fatal to its identification with the non- 
resistance doctrine of Buddha and Lao-tse. 

Apart from the circumstances which for the time being made 
non-resistance, or rather mere passive resistance, the policy of true 
statesmanship alike against Assyrian and against Roman domina- 
tion, Isaiah and Jesus stood together upon the most fundamental 
point of all, unqualified, unlimited loyalty to the God of Right- 
eousness and to his sovereignty upon earth. Their pacifism differs 
from that of Lao-tse and of Buddha in the important respect of 
having a pronounced theistic basis. Buddha and Lao-tse can 
preach consistently a doctrine of absolute non-resistance because 
their systems are destitute of the social ideal of Israel's religion, 
and indeed ignore the very existence of a "Power not ourselves 

2 See below as to the fourth evangelist's explanation of Jesus' claim to be 
the Davidic Shepherd of Israel only in the sense of uniting the scattered 
flock of God. 



66 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

that makes for Righteousness." Contrariwise with the great 
prophets of the Kingdom of God. Whether of the Christian or 
pre-Christian dispensation, so far as they advocate non-resistance 
it cannot be unhmited, because their religious aim is not merely 
individual hut social. 

The non-resistance of Isaiah and of Jesus is not self-centered 
but God-centered. It is bound to consider what is expedient for 
others, for the weak and dependent, as well as for the individual, 
and for the present time. It seeks^ the welfare of the world and of 
generations to come. It is always subsidiary to the paramount 
interest of the Kingdom of God. 

Just because it regards non-resistance not as an end in itself 
but only as one of the divinest means to an end, Biblical pacifism 
can hold before men's eyes the moving figure of the martyred 
Servant, dumb as the lamb in the shearer's hands, while it can in 
the same breath commend the men of violence that take the King- 
dom of Heaven by force. Christian or pre-Christian, it rests upon 
the foundation of utter, absolute loyalty to a world-wide Republic 
of God, a cosmic sovereignty of righteousness, and having this 
social aim for its religious ideal it can and does nourish to the 
highest pitch of devotion the heroic virtues of patriotism, of ser- 
vice and of sacrifice. The summons to the standard (not men's 
but God's) is ever the same. The weapon may be the sword or 
the cross, as the times require. Under mere self-centered philos- 
ophies such as those of Buddha and Lao-tse the contrary is true. 
Notoriously, where these control patriotism and all its heroic 
virtues tend to dwindle, approaching often the verge of extinction. 

The pacifism (not non-resistance) of Isaiah hardly requires 
elucidation. Two or three very familiar quotations will suffice. 
There is, for example, the prophet's vision of a universal peace 
based on international law. This vision of the world's willing f 
acceptance of the sovereignty of Jehovah's justice Isaiah shares 
with his contemporary, Micah, both prophets seeming to choose 
it as a text from some forgotten earlier pacifist. 



NON-RESISTANCE: CHRISTIAN OR PAGAN? 67 

It shall come to pass in the latter days 

That the mountain of Jehovah's house shall be 

stablished at the head of mountains. 
And shall be exalted above the hills. 
And all nations shall flow unto it. 

And many peoples shall go and say. Come, let us 

go up to the mountain of Jehovah, 
To the house of the God of Jacob, 
And he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk 

in his paths. 
For out of Zion shall go forth law, and the word of 

Jehovah from Jerusalem. 

And he shall judge between the nations, and will 

be arbiter for many peoples; 
And they shall beat their swords into plow-shares, 

and their spears into pruning-hooks. 
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. 
Neither shall they learn war any more. 

Manifestly the ideal of an international tribunal as the basis 
of a League of Peace is not so novel as some modern statesman- 
ship seems to conceive. 

But the consistent, thoroughgoing advocate of non-resistance 
rejects even the coercion of magisterial and police constraint. To 
Russian idealism restraint of the individual as well as the national 
criminal is tainted with the same poison of violence. Since Isaiah 
is the exemplar of non-resistance he should be permitted again to 
speak for himself. His words seem, to have a singular applica- 
bility to the land which is now testing to the limit the theory of 
Proudhon, the individualist of individualists, the gospel of anar- 
chism : 

For behold the Lord, Jehovah of Hosts, doth take away from 

Jerusalem and from Judah stay and staff, 
The whole stay of bread and the whole stay of water. 
The mighty man, and the man of war; 



68 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

The judge and the prophet, the diviner and the elder; 

The captain of fifty and the honorable man and the counsellor . . . 

And I will give children to be their princes, 

And with childishness shall they rule over them, 

And the people shall be oppressed every one by another, and 

every one by his neighbor: 
The child shall be arrogant against the old man, and the base 

against the honorable. 

But Isaiah, too, expects deliverance from these miseries of for- 
eign servitude and domestic anarchy. He looks for the dawn of 
a just and lasting peace; only the means of its attainment seem 
strange for an "exemplar of non-resistance." 

The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; 
They that dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them 

hath the light shined. 
Thou hast multiplied the nation and increased their joy. 
They joy before thee according to the rejoicing at harvest-time. 
As men rejoice when they divide the spoil. 

For the yoke of (Israel's) burden, and the rod laid to his shoulder, 
The staff of his oppressor, thou hast broken as in the day of 

Midian. 

For all the armor of the armed man in the tumult 

And the garments rolled in blood shall be for burning, for fuel 

of fire. 
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. 
And the government shall be upon his shoulder: 
And his name shall be called: Wonderful-counsellor; 
The-Mighty-God-the-Everlasting (my) -Father; 
The Prince of Peace. 

Of the increase of his government and of peace there shall be 
no end. 

Upon the throne of David and upon his kingdom, ' 

To establish it, and to uphold it with justice and with righteous- 
ness from henceforth even forever. 

The zeal of Jehovah of Hosts will perform this. 



NON-RESISTANCE: CHRISTIAN OR PAGAN? 69 

Even with the devout restraint of the closing line it must be 
admitted that these verses have a somewhat martial ring. 

Doubtless the pacifist will emphasize the line, "The zeal of 
Jehovah of Hosts will perform this," taking here the view of the 
Pharisees, who in contrast with the fanatical nationalism of the 
Zealots opposed the aggressive militarism of the later Maccabees 
with a doctrine of quietism. Their cry was, "Leave all to God." 
Against the Zealot they appealed to the proverb: "They that 
take the sword shall perish by the sword," from which the infer- 
ence is plain that if the aim be never to lose one's life one should 
never take weapons. But perhaps Isaiah the "non-resistant" is 
entitled to one more chance to prove himself not a Pharisee, even 
when he expects "the zeal of Jehovah of Hosts" to win the victory 
of peace. Fortunately he tells us Jww he expects the zeal of 
Jehovah to operate, in the doom he pronounces upon "drunkard" 
Samaria, the city whose luxuriant mountain-top was crowned 
with mingled towers and olive groves, like the fading wreaths upon 
the heads of drunken revellers. In contrast to Samaria's fate 
Isaiah has this promise for the temple-crowned hill of Zion, 
shadowed under its altar smoke: 

In that day will Jehovah of Hosts become a crown of glory 
And a diadem o£ beauty unto the residue of his people, 
A spirit of justice to him that sitteth in judgment. 
And a spirit of strength to them that turn back the battle at the 
gate.^ 

II 

It should hardly be necessary to explain that Jesus in deliberately 
giving up the career of purely non-political preacher, teacher, and 
healer, to assume the careei* of Christ and Son of David, fully 

3 The citations are all from the unquestioned writings of the First Isaiah, 
Isa. 2:2-4; 3:1-5; 9:2-7 and 28:1-6. The rendering is made independently 
from the Hebrew. 



70 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

conscious as he was of all the dangers it implied, was neither ig- 
norant of the Isaian ideal, nor out of sympathy with it. When 
he rode into Jerusalem accepting the acclamation : "Blessed be 
the kingdom that cometh, the kingdom of our father David," he 
was not betraying the national hope ; he was lifting it toward ulti- 
mate realization at the cost of Calvary. 

It is true that he avoided suicidal collision with Roman author- 
ity on the one side, as prudently as he forestalled the sweeping 
off of his following into the insane fanaticism of the Zealot 
nationalists on the other. The prophet's method of a symbolic 
purifying of the temple was exactly suited to this purpose. In 
the temple Roman authority explicitly renounced control. The 
policing of this combined fortress, sanctuary, and treasure house 
was left, even to the power of life and death, in the hands of the 
Sadducean hierocracy. It was administered by a numerous and 
efficient Levite police commanded by a "captain of the temple." 
On the other hand, Sadducean control was notoriously and infa- 
mously corrupt. The abuses by which (with their connivance) 
money was extorted from the worshippers made it so hateful that 
a worthy reformer might be sure of popular support strong 
enough to cow "the hissing brood of Annas" into an interval of 
"fear of the people." And the reform might even be accomplished 
without unchaining the red fool-fury of the Zealot mob, if it was 
seen to be the work of a prophet, by authority "from heaven" and 
not "of men," consistent, even if regarded as a messianic act, with 
the course of one who had come "meek and lowly and having salva- 
tion, riding upon an ass, and on a colt the foal of an ass." 

It is of vital importance to a historical appreciation of Jesus' 
sense of his mission to realize fully and adequately what he meant 
by this one public overt act of his career; for by it he signalized 
to all Israel assembled at the Passover his purpose to achieve 
a national deliverance such as the feast commemorated. From it 
every loyal Israelite might infer that the hope of "the kingdom 
of David" was now about to be realized. Jesus thus entered de- 



NON-RESISTANCE: CHRISTIAN OR PAGAN? 71 

liberately upon the stormy and dangerous seas of messianistic 
agitation, as a claimant to leadership in the achievement of the 
national hope. 

To herald such a reform as Jesus proposed, reviving the na- 
tional ideal, the purification of the temple was a symbolic act 
worthy of the greatest of prophets. It was exactly fitted to raise 
and define the issues at stake. It would convey just the right 
impression to the multitude, whose attention could be reached by 
this time-honored method, and by this method alone. It was also 
free from the worst dangers of messianistic agitation. It would 
avoid on the one hand the Scylla of needless collision with Roman 
authority, and on the other the Charybdis of Zealot turbulence. 
The calm and fearless "authority from heaven" with which it was 
effected overawed resistance, so that even while asserted hy force 
it attained its result with the shedding of no other blood than the 
Messenger's own. 

To show the exact meaning to contemporary Jewish minds of 
this act of the Prophet of Nazareth we must recall not merely the 
Isaian ideal of the "Davidic" reign as a universal kingdom of 
righteousness and peace based on divine law going forth from 
Zion, but also the later apocalyptic hopes. We must remember 
that all expectation in Jesus' time was focussed on the prophecies 
of Malachi, which made the purified temple the scene of Jehovah's 
visitation of his people, after they should have been brought to 
a "great repentance" by the coming of Elias. A rabbinic parable 
of the period will give us the point of view. It is an answer to 
the reproach so bitterly resented by Isaiah, "Israel is a wife for- 
saken," and is based on Malachi 1 : 6-14, and 3: 1-12 interpreting 
the designation "Tent of Witness" applied to the tabernacle in 
Exodus 38 : 21 : 

A king was angry with his wife and forsook her. The neighbors de- 
clared, "He will not return" (of. Isa. 49: 14). Then the king sent 
word to her (Mai. 1 : 10 ff) : "Cleanse my palace, and on such and such 
a day I will return to thee." He came and was reconciled to her. 



72 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

Therefore is the sanctuary called the Tent of "Witness" — a witness 
to the Gentiles that God is no longer wroth.* 

Jesus' act was the assertion of authority "from heaven" to make 
Jehovah's will supreme upon earth, beginning at his own sanc- 
tuary. It was effected by direct appeal to the conscience of 
the masses, which to the extent of their understanding responded 
overwhelmingly. Jesus did not expect his act to be more than 
"a witness to the peoples." But on the other hand, for the time 
being at least, he sacrificed no life save his oAvn. One close parallel 
could be cited from modern times if the demonstration could be 
freed from its unfortunate association with really fanatical revolt 
and real intention to provoke a servile insurrection. In keeping 
his demonstration in the temple free from entangling alliance with 
Zealot nationalism, Jesus showed a moderation and foresight 
which were unfortunately lacking to the demonstration of John 
Brown at Harpers Ferry; otherwise the two have many points 
of affinity. It was while the governor of Virginia was still hesitat- 
ing to sign the death warrant of the champion of negro emancipa- 
tion, long before his martyr spirit marched on before great armies 
of liberation', that Ralph Waldo Emerson, once himself a non- 
resistant pacifist, wrote in his journal: 

If John Brown shall suffer^ he will make the gallows glorious like the 
cross. 

Ill 

That Jesus intended to raise the standard of David by his public 
act at the Passover is certain. His pacifism was of the type of 
Micah's and Isaiah's. That he meant the act to convey a religious 
sense differentiating it from the merely political ideal of the 
Zealots is also certain. His doctrine of reliance on spiritual 
methods in the pursuit of the God-given aim exalts forbearance 
as a means in terms not less noble than the foremost champions 
of non-resistance. We may question whether he actually counted 
4 Mai. 3:1-4; 4:1-6. 



NON-RESISTANCE: CHRISTIAN OR PAGAN? 73 

upon his own only too probable fate of crucifixion at Roman 
hands as destined to serve the precise end which it actually has 
subserved in human history. Those who see it with the wisdom 
of retrospect know that it has furnished to all devotees of Israel's 
ideal of the Kingdom of God, in all races, unto all successive gen- 
erations, a rallying point and a symbol of final victory. But 
Jesus was looking forward with the eye of faith, not backward 
with the eye of knowledge. He believed that even through death 
God would give victory to those who sacrificed life and all to his 
kingdom's cause, and that it would be given ere their generation 
had passed into oblivion. How much further than this his 
prophetic insight into the ways of God with men extended is a 
question which will be variously answered in accordance with 
varying views of his personality. It need be no matter of surprise, 
however, to any discerning mind, that the fourth evangelist should 
also look backAvard at the significance of the cross, interpreting 
it in the light of its actual results. The fourth evangelist is the 
successor of Paul at Ephesus. Like Paul he naturally empha- 
sizes its effect in "reconciliation," a twofold atonement, "breaking 
down the enmity" between man and God, and also that between 
man and man; and the great barrier of Paul's experience was 
that erected by the Mosaic law between Jew and Gentile. By the 
cross, says Paul to the Ephesians, Christ who is "our peace"^ 

made both one, and brake down the middle wall of partition, having 
abolished in his flesh the enmity; even the law of commandments con- 
tained in ordinances, that he might create in himself of the twain one 
new man, so making peace ; and might reconcile them both in one body 
unto God through the cross, having slain the enmity thereby. 

No wonder Paul thinks of God as "the God of peace," the gospel 
as "the gospel of peace" and Christ as "our peace" proclaimed 
to the nations near and far. 

That is the pacifism of Christianity. No wonder Paul's great 
successor at Ephesus compares this healing and reconciling cross 

5 Paul is elaborating Isa. 57: 19. 



74 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

to the token of forgiveness and faith which Moses lifted up in the 
wilderness, and repeatedly presents as its divinely appointed aim 
the "gathering into one the children of God that are scattered 
abroad" (John 11 : 51-52). 

The fourth evangelist devotes the closing section of his story 
of the public ministry to this great question, Why Jesus came for- 
ward as the Christ? The scene he chooses is Jerusalem at the 
Feast of Dedication, that festival which commemorated the death 
and resurrection of the Maccabean martyrs who had given their 
lives for the national ideal. The story begins with the Jews' de- 
mand of Jesus that he "tell them plainly" whether he is the Christ. 
It ends with the mystical utterance of the high priest : 

that Jesus should die for the nation^ and not for that nation only^ but 
that he might gather together into one the children of God which are 
scattered abroad. 

To show what alternative lay before him we are told of a delega- 
tion of Greeks who wait upon Jesus, apparently to invite him to 
"go to the Gentiles and teach them," but who receive as their 
answer, after a momentary soul-conflict paralleling the scene of 
Gethsemane, that Jesus "must be lifted up," and thus through his 
martyr death "will draw all men unto him." The central scene of 
the raising of Lazarus is of course directed to the resurrection 
theme appropriate to this feast, the theme of the Christ who as 
Messenger of God brings life and immortality to light. But the 
whole section rests back on an opening parable, that of the Good 
Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep (John 10: 11-18). 
Our concern is with this parable; for it is not an invention of 
the fourth evangelist, but an authentic comparison of Jesus 
attested by the preceding evangelists,® and merely developed in 
the later interpretative gospel along the lines of the original 
prophecy,^ and with special reference to the cross as a token of 

6 Mk. 6: 34; 14: 27 and parallels. 

7 Ezek. 34. 



NON-RESISTANCE: CHRISTIAN OR PAGAN? 75 

unity in estranged and warring humanity evoked by Joyalty to a 
common higher ideal. 

In the parable of the Good Shepherd, as elsewhere, the fourth 
evangelist shows that his view of the tragedy of Calvary is deter- 
mined by its actual result. The function of the Shepherd is to 
gather a flock now scattered, and which includes "other sheep 
that are not of this fold." The aim is "that there may be one 
flock; one Shepherd," an aim suggested by Paul. But primarily 
the parable is simply an adaptation of Ezekiel's famous indict- 
ment of the hireling shepherds of Israel, who had first exploited 
Jehovah's flock, and then abandoned it to the ravening of wild 
beasts. Because of this, the prophet declares, Jehovah himself 
will seek out the scattered and bleeding remnant and will set up 
over them a worthy shepherd, the son of David. 

The special application made by the fourth evangelist is to 
the gathering of a flock already scattered, bleeding, and torn 
of beasts, because of the faithlessness of hireling shepherds. Such 
was in truth the task imposed by the conditions of the time. Such 
was in the experience of Paul and his generation the actual effect 
of the cross. But primarily and in Jesus' mind it was simply the 
token of the last supreme measure of devotion which he, and all 
who would follow him, must be prepared to pay in loyalty to the 
Kingdom of God. Its comparison is purely and simply a contrast 
between two types of leadership. On the one side is he who lays 
down his life in defence of the helpless, be it in conflict, as when 
David the shepherd lad with sling and stone rescued his sheep 
*'out of the paw of the lion and the bear," or be it in search for 
the lost lamb upon the mountainside. On the other side is he who 
"when he seeth the wolf coming leave th the sheep and fleeth." The 
special need of the time, that which appealed to Jesus as the 
supreme need of those to whom he was sent, was his people's need 
of a standard and leadership, rescue of the scattered and lost. 

When he saw the multitude he had compassion on them because they 
were distressed and scattered as sheep that have no shepherd. 



76 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

He gave them the needed rallying point, a sign in which afterward 
they should conquer. He also gave them the needed leadership. 
The former was the need of the first age of the Church. The 
second need is ours ; for defence of the flock is as much a shep- 
herd's task as seeking out the lost. They who abandon it in the 
face of wolfish attack need expect no approval from the Son of 
David. 

IV 

There is a certain magnificence of logical consistency in the non- 
resistance doctrine of the pacifist who chooses the Empire of 
China (!) as the example of its perfect work in the field of interna- 
tional relations.® With the blessed example of the Celestial King- 
dom before us we are asked : 

What did it avail Belgium to marshal her armies and hold her forts 
against the irresistible advance of the German legions ?^ 

The question has an extraordinary resemblance to that ad- 
dressed by the Kaiser to King Albert in Punch's famous car- 
toon: "Don't you see that Belgium has lost everything .f^" And 
Albert's answer is taken from Christ's own lips : "She has not lost 
her soul." The Celestial Empire on the other hand seems to this 
champion of the pacifism of Lao-tse to have practically realized 
the blessings of the Kingdom of Heaven. Peacefully non-resistant 
under the corrupt domination of its Manchu conquerors it had 
attained the climax of earthly felicity. It had a name to live, 
and was dead. 

The Chinese and the Quakers, each in their own way, are finished 
products. What they are is all they ever can be. Which means from 
the standpoint of national idealism, that non-resistarice is the "saving 
element."^" 

This eulogy of China, however, . was written before the new 
Republic of China, stirring the long dormant instincts of Chinese 

8 "New Wars for Old," pp. 253-258. 
^Ihid. p. 223. 
10 Ibid. p. 258. 



NON-RESISTANCE: CHRISTIAN OR PAGAN? 77 

patriotism, had roused to new hopes and visions of world achieve- 
ment the body that had become as one dead, insomuch that the 
more part said. He is dead. But non-resistant pacifism is ever 
rich in paradox. Today China herself, so long inert, blessed for 
so many centuries with all the felicity of submission, has thrown 
off the Manchu yoke of domination. And in the first surge of new- 
found strength she declares war against Attila and his Huns, and 
in the declaration itself avows that she is "fighting to establish 
peace." To such inconsistency does non-resistance seem fated as 
soon as life triumphs over death, as soon as the Christian gospel 
of a world kingdom of righteousness and peace triumphs over 
Buddha's pessimistic obliteration of desire and hope together in 
the gray nirvana of extinction. "Eternal life" through death- 
defying loyalty to a divine ideal begins at last to seem preferable, 
even in China, to mere indefinite "survival." 

Not Quakerdom itself seems able to maintain consistency with 
its non-resistant ideals. Alas, 

they were abandoned by those who could not and would not see the 
connection between these principles and the uninterrupted peace which 
had long blessed the Pennsylvania colony. 

Becoming itself directly responsible for the order and security 
hitherto guaranteed by the sovereign British power the Quaker 
commonwealth followed the example of its neighbor states and girt 
on the sword.^^ For this, doubtless, we may hold the influx of alien 
immigrants more responsible than the genuine followers of Fox 
and Penn. But it must at least be admitted that Quaker leaven 
showed little power to work, so far as the doctrine and policy of 
non-resistance are concerned. 

Inconsistencies such as these on the part of the greatest modern 
exemplars of non-resistance are saddening to its champions, but 
there remains ever a more ethereal realm, where philosophy can 
build without fear of the stern realities of life, the limbo of utopias. 

11 "New Wars for Old," p. 241. 



78 RELIGION AND THE WAR 



Jesus, too, they tell us, though greatest of all non-resistants, 
was also "inconsistent." Was he, then, inconsistent with himself? 
Or was his pacifism the active pacifism of those who give their 
lives for just and lasting peace, the peace that is real and not 
mere devastation, not destruction and tyranny miscalled Kultur; 
not might triumphant over right and unashamed ; but a peace that 
endures because justice and right have been enthroned? 

Jesus closed his public teaching with the doctrine that all reli- 
gion, all duty to God and man, is summed up in the two com- 
mandments : Unreserved, unqualified, unfaltering devotion to the 
One God of Righteousness and Truth; unselfish devotion to the 
common weal of man. One who in obedience to this law of love 
took up the succession of Moses, David and the prophets, raising 
the standard of God's real sovereignty on earth, and paying to 
it the last full measure of his own devotion, has not deserved 
the accusation of inconsistency. Jesus was sublimely consistent. 
That interpretation of his words which refuses the witness of his 
heroic deeds to their true meaning is guilty of the inconsistency. 

■ It is true, as Tolstoy finely says, that Jesus' noble depiction 
in the Sermon on the Mount of the forbearance of God as the 
standard of the higher righteousness means that we should "never 
do anything contrary to the law of love." But by what right does 
the great Russian pacifist (or any other who claims for his theory 
the authority of Jesus) omit from that law of love its "first and 
great commandment"? How can we ignore the demand of supreme 
and unqualified devotion to the God of Righteousness, whose king- 
dom of righteous peace Jesus gave his life to establish, and limit 
our obedience to acquiescence in the demands of men, be they 
righteous or the reverse? The second commandment of the Law 
of Love is dependent on the first, and in separation from it will 
assuredly be misconstrued. Equal love of neighbor can be no 
requirement of religion, save as it depends on the prior obligation 



NON-RESISTANCE: CHRISTIAN OR PAGAN? 79 

of supreme devotion to a common Father, whose forbearing, for- 
giving love extends equally to all. Imitation of that Father's 
goodness and forbearance, overcoming the evil of the world with 
good, is the one teaching, the comprehensive, unifying principle, 
of the Sermon on the Mount. But the God whose goodness this 
great discourse sets up as the standard of the righteousness of all 
"sons and daughters of the Highest" is not a non-resistant God. 
It is the just and merciful God depicted in those Scriptures 
wherein Jesus read his beneficent will and purpose for the world. 

It is not enough for the Christian merely "to do nothing con- 
trary to the law of love" ; he must actively toil and suffer in its 
service, fighting to the death. His personal enemy he may and 
must forgive. Enemies have thus been won to the kingdom. The 
enemy of the weak and defenceless brother he must resist. The 
enemy of God's kingdom he must fight to the death. It is true 
that this foe of God is no human or visible foe. Our wrestling is 
not against flesh and blood; it is against the principalities and 
powers of darkness in the heavenly places. But we do not beat the 
air. This power of darkness finds incarnation in human form at 
least as readily as the Power of light. He fights with real and con- 
crete weapons, and this reality is the ultimate test. For the foe 
who thus incarnates the evil power the Christian has no hatred 
as brother-man ; only as agent of the evil power. The hatred ceases 
when the man renounces the evil allegiance. Hence the paradox of 
love that may necessitate a blow. Self-deception is here all too 
easy, but absolutely selfless devotion may be trusted even here 
not to substitute its own cause for God's. 

The very paragraph from which the non-resistants draw their 
doctrine has this conclusion : 

Wherefore seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and 
all these (outward blessings) shall be added unto you. 

It is because Jesus sought first the kingdom, which means right- 
eousness, peace and good will among men, sovereignty of right over 



80 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

might, overthrow of the powers of darkness which claim as their 
own the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, that he 
could teach as the best means to its attainment forbearance and 
loving-kindness to the limit. For a limit there is — the divine limit 
of the welfare of all. Loj^alty to this ideal led Jesus to crown 
his sublime teaching with action sublimer still. When the scenes 
of his earlier ministry were closed, he left the quiet paths of 
teacher and healer in Galilee to tread the martyr's road, and to 
set up in his own cross an ensign to rally the scattered and bleed- 
ing flock of God. Because he sought "first the kingdom of God" 
Jesus held back his disciples from the bloody and disastrous path 
of Zealot fanaticism, and bade Peter return his futile sword to 
its sheath. For the same reason and no other he depicted to his 
disciples the Good Shepherd laying down his life in defence of the 
flock, and poured scorn upon the hireling who "when he seeth the 
wolf coming, leaveth the sheep and fleeth." It is for the same 
reason and no other that he also warned them of days to come 
when it should be the duty of the disciple unprovided with a sword 
\o "sell his garment and buy one," days when onh^ he that endured 
unto the end, fighting to the death against the powers of darkness, 
should be saved. 

Jesus teaches unlimited non-resistance where only personal and 
selfish interests are at stake ; but resistance unto blood for the 
sake of the Kingdom of God and his righteousness. In this he is 
inconsistent with non-resistant pacifism that can see no diff^erence 
between this doctrine and that of Buddha or Lao-tse. Jesus even 
reverses that Bolshevist pacifism that to save its own skin throws 
to the Turkish-Teuton wolves the bleeding remnant of the earliest 
historic flock of Christ. He approves rather shepherds that give 
their lives fighting in defence of their helpless charge. He is incon- 
sistent with the theories and philosophies of non-resistance ; but he 
is consistent, sublimely consistent, with his own gospel of the 
sovereignty of God. 



NON-RESISTANCE: CHRISTIAN OR PAGAN? 81 

The rule of truly Christian pacifism is not hard to understand 
when we approach it from the standpoint of those who after the 
precept and example of Jesus seek ^rst the Kingdom of God. Men 
of this type are ready like "all the saints who nobly fought of old" 
to lose their lives in this high cause, that they may save them unto 
life eternal. For individuals and for nations the rule is the same: 
"In thine own cause strike never, not even in self-defence ; in God's 
cause strike when he bids thee strike and cease not, come victory 
or death." There is, no doubt, an easy self-delusion, prone to 
identify its own cause with God's. But against this blasphemous 
egotism human history henceforth will ever set up the abhorrent 
warning of a certain imperial attitudinizer whom we do not need 
to name. There is a time for forbearance, patience, longsuffering, 
up to the limit of the forbearance of that God who seeks only the 
good of all, and who seeks it in wisdom and justice as well as in 
forbearance. The time is up to that limit, and not beyond it. If 
the enemy can be won, win him. Turn the other cheek, surrender 
tunic along with cloak. But forbearance is not meant to play 
into the hands of the evil power. There is also a time when it only 
gluts the ravenous maw of inhuman, soulless tyranny, a time when 
incarnate evil sits in the very temple of God, setting itself forth 
as God, a time when the law of violence is openly avowed and 
exalted above the law of mercy and right, a time of the beast and 
the false prophet, threatening to turn civilization back again to 
the age of Lamech and Tubal-cain. That is a time to remember 
also the commandment, "Let him that hath no sword sell his cloak 
and buy one," and the promise : "He that overcometh, I will give 
to him to sit down with me on my throne, as I also overcame, and 
sat down with my Father on his throne." 



V 

THE MINISTRY AND THE WAR 

HENRY HALLAM TWEEDY 

When the greatest crime in all history was perpetrated and the 
wo rid- war began, it was natural and necessary that the min- 
istry of all lands should buckle on the Christian armor and take its 
place in the fighting ranks. Thousands volunteered as chaplains 
and Y. M. C. A. workers. Thousands more — two thousand at one 
•time in Canada alone — equally eager to don the khaki and endure 
their share of the hardships, waited impatiently until a door could 
be opened for them to go. In the training camps and in the 
trenches, in hut and in hospital, these men found new parishes and 
pulpits, ministering in a multitude of -ways, and finding oppor- 
tunities for Christ-like service in the soldier's ever}"^ need. They did 
more than preach sermons, hold Bible classes, and act as spiritual 
comforters and advisers. To them, as to Donald Hankey's "beloved 
captain," no task was too petty or too menial, no lowly service 
beneath them, if it lightened the burdens or added to the comfort 
and efficiency of the fighters. At all times and everywhere, in all 
ways and by all means, they strove to represent the Master, who 
cared for bodies as well as for souls, for the resting times and food 
and tired feet as well as for the thoughts and motives and ambi- 
tions of his disciples. They were the ambassadors of the Prince of 
Peace and the army's public friends. 

All this was only what might have been expected. The arresting 
fact was to find these prophets of peace, with comparatively few 
exceptions, proclaiming the righteousness of our participation in 
the war. In 1915 when the Continent, of Chicago, sent out a 



THE MINISTRY AND THE WAR 83 

questionnaire among the Presbyterian ministers of the country, 
an overwhelming majority declared themselves in favor of pre- 
paredness. A vote in Brooklyn, embracing ministers in something 
like twenty denominations, showed one hundred and fifty-one in 
favor of preparedness, while six qualified their approval and only 
fourteen were opposed. These are indications of the trend of 
thought among the ministers of America ; and though they may 
not give direct and unimpeachable evidence of how these men would 
have viewed the entrance of the United States into the European 
debacle, it would seem to be a legitimate inference that their atti- 
tude would be the same. When a nation, patient and forbearing 
until her enemies scoffed and her friends grieved, found herself 
compelled to defend her unquestioned rights against lawless and 
brutal pirates, minds which approved of preparedness for war 
would naturally, almost inevitably, approve of war. Nor was it 
our rights only. We entered the struggle not through pride or 
greed or hatred, but as the champion of international law, right- 
eousness, liberty, democracy, and a world peace that shall be 
abiding and just for all. 

To the few pacifists among the clergy all this seems quite un- 
necessary. Why should not America walk in the footsteps of Jesus, 
set her face steadfastly toward her Jerusalem, and for the world's 
salvation suffer Germany and Austria and Turkey to drive the 
spikes through her hands .'^ Why not permit the Central Powers 
to seize and possess our country, even though they dealt with 
those of us, who could not and would not submit to the ethics of 
Nietzsche and the diplomacy of Bernhardi and the rule of 
von Hindenburg, as they treated the fathers and mothers and 
little children of Armenia and Belgium and Poland.'' "Resist not 
evil !" The cure of Christ's time is the cure of our time ! The age 
of Judas and of Pilate, of the scribes and brutal Roman soldiers, 
has never passed. 

This is not the place to attempt to settle the dispute between 
the champions of peace at any price and those of a war which. 



84 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

rightly or wrongly, they regard as righteous and unavoidable. 
It certainly will never be decided by calling all pacifists cowards 
and slackers, and all defenders of the course pursued by President 
Wilson, the son of a clergyman, exponents of Prussian militarism. 
The plain fact is that there is no path open to us which presents 
no moral difficulties. It is not a choice between absolute right and 
absolute wrong, but between the preponderance of right and the 
preponderance of wrong. As some one has phrased it, "War is a 
moral enterprise, if it redeems a state from a condition worse than 
war" ; and that — so it seemed to thousands of ethical and religious 
teachers — was the situation in America. To have watched the 
violation of Belgium, the massacre of Armenia, the destruction 
of England, France and Italy, the absorption of Russia, and 
ultimately the forging of the chains of our own servitude, without 
striking a blow to protect the world against the unspeakable 
barbarism of a megalomaniac would have been ethical madness. 
Granting the culprit's sanity, it would have been a kind of reli- 
gious paranoia not to bring the international butcher and brigand 
to terms. The man who stands by, while a thug robs his neighbor's 
house and murders the wife and children, practically cooperates 
with the criminal. If he is a saint, he is a saintly Raffles. Though 
he never strike a blow, he bears the mark of Cain. Leaders like 
the Rev. Charles A. Eaton, D.D., of the Madison Avenue Baptist 
Church in New York City, have ventured to characterize our 
participation in the struggle as "our Christian duty." Many even 
of our Quakers vigorously champion it. Mr. John L. Carver, the 
head of the Friends' School in New York and Brooklyn, writes : 
"First and last, let us have no compromise or suggestion of com- 
promise as to the justice of the American cause^ — no admixture 
of false pacifism in relation to one of the few absolutely just and 
unavoidable wars that the world has ever seen, unmarred by 
fanaticism, mistaken hatred, or lust of gain. Let us permit no 
confusion of ideas between old time wars of aggression or revenge, 
and this present war of unselfish sacrifice to save humanity from 



THE MINISTRY AND THE WAR 85 

the reign of the beast." With this it is safe to say the great 
majority of Christians, la}^ and clerical, heartily agree. War is 
always bad ; but there are situations when to decline to give battle, 
permitting the foe to work his immoral will, is not only still more 
terrible in its cost but more awful in its moral degradation. To 
kill is always an evil ; but it is less of an evil, both for society and 
for the evil doer, than to permit a band of deluded assassins to 
run amuck in the ranks of civilization and to practice their marks- 
manship on the gentlest of women and the noblest of men. Almost 
to a man the leaders of thought in the allied countries, with un- 
willing minds and breaking hearts, have reached this decision. 
Rightly or wrongly, it is the answer which has come to their 
agonized petition, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do.?" 

But there is a still more striking fact. Not only are our min- 
isters like Sir George Adam Smith in khaki and Dr. Henry 
Van Dyke in the uniform of the navy, toiling as spiritual special- 
ists for our soldiers and sailors. Not only ai-e teachers like 
Principal Forsyth and ex-President Taft proclaiming our moral 
duty and legal right to participate in the greatest and most 
terrible of wars. After careful deliberation an ever-increasing 
number of ministers, especially among those of draft age, both 
in the pastorate and in the seminary, have given up their dis- 
tinctive work, donned the uniform of the soldier, and sailed for the 
trenches of France. To some minds this seems incredible foil}', 
a species of ministerial madness. War is so tigerish in its ruth- 
lessness, so demoniacal in its treatment of ethical principles, so 
un-Christian in matter and in method, that it appears impossible 
to characterize any participation as righteous. It is, no doubt, 

1 the minister's duty to play the role of Good Samaritan when, with 

I nations as his victims, the modern Hun repeats the parable. But 
can he still bear the title of minister if he joins the police force 

I and attempts, even at the cost of killing the robbers, to clean up 

I the Jericho road ? 

The answer of these men has been an enthusiastic affirmative. 



86 RELIGION AND THE WiVR 

To them their clerical exemption was something more than what 
Dean Shailer Mathews called it, "an insult or a challenge." No 
doubt there were good reasons why certain trained specialists, 
and themselves among them, should be set to work with tools other 
than bayonets. The physician, the engineer, the munitions expert, 
the ship-builder and the chaplain will all have their part in the 
triumph. Mr. Hoover, Mr. Schwab and the Archbishop of York 
will do more in their present positions than they could behind a 
machine gun or in an aeroplane. They, and millions of men and 
women in lowly stations, can fight at home for peace and for 
freedom ; and when the burden is heaviest and the strain almost 
unendurable, call cheerily, as Harry Lauder did to the Scotch 
Highlander: "No, man, I'm no tired! If you can die fighting for 
me, I can die working for you !" 

But this patent plea did not satisfy some militant ministers. 
Their religion as well as their patriotism carried them beyond 
Dean Mathews' interpretation of the phrase. Grant that their 
exemption is an insult if it "implies that ministers are not as 
ready to serve their country as any other citizens, that they are 
slackers, or that they are* so effeminate that they would not make 
good soldiers ; that if they go about their work with no increase 
of labor or of sacrifice, making an excuse out of their holy calling, 
they accept their exemption as an insult to their calling." Grant 
that, if this is not true, it comes to them as a great challenge to 
do and to dare as much in their spiritual work as the soldier does 
in his, toiling to the limit of costly sacrifice, possibly to overwork 
and to death. They are quite ready to burn out, and that quickly, 
when the age demands the heat and light of their lives. But there 
was still in their hearts a service unexpressed, an intense desire 
ungratified. One hears the call in the following letter from a 
minister, who is now a lieutenant with a Canadian regiment in 
France : 

"I expect to go to the front in Europe in the near future," he 
wrote to the editor of the Outlook. "For six years I was a Presby- 



THE MINISTRY AND THE WAR 87 

terian minister, although a Canadian, in the Presbyterian Church 
of the United States. When the cause of liberty and the ideals 
of democracy were at stake, I could not withstand the 'call' — not 
so much of my country as of civilization — any longer. I resigned 
my charge and came to Nova Scotia, my boyhood home. It seems 
strange, but true nevertheless, that today I am a happy man. I 
hate war and know something about it — I served through the 
South African War and saw its results — but there are things 
worse than war. I am going, as I find many of my comrades going, 
not because we hate the German people, but because we believe 
that Prussian militarism would be an intolerable system for the 
world to live under." 

"Is this a psychological and moral paradox .P" comments the 
editor. "We think not. Every man who really grasps the meaning 
of the words righteousness, justice and peace, and their true rela- 
tions, will understand the state of mind of this Canadian clergy- 
man." It is the decision of one who loves and honors the calling 
of the ministry, and yet feels that in this crisis there is a place 
where he, whatever may be true of his fellows, is more greatly 
needed. It is the confession of faith on the part of a Christian 
who knows war and hates it, and yet is happy to make it because 
he loves peace, and believes, rightly or wrongly, that if the woi4d 
is to possess it in our time, it must be won with the sword. It is 
the deed of a brother of all men who declines to be limited by his 
cloth, who cannot preach to the soldier without drinking the 
soldier's cup and being baptized with his baptism of mud and of 
blood. It is the spirit of a true Christian preacher, who cannot 
urge Christian laymen to "go over the top" unless at least some 
Christian ministers go with them. It is the jubilant response to 
the call of the heroic, the comradeship which knows no secular and 
no sacred, and which covets the most intimate fellowship in the 
life and sufferings of brave men. 

The same attitude is being increasingly taken by the peace- 
loving Friends. "The young Quaker of the present day," writes 



88 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

one of them, "is so true to his inheritance— that of being allowed 
to act as his conscience dictates — that there are already many 
in the service, and that, too, with the fervent cooperation of their 
Quaker parents. . . . When one of these young Friends — now a 
trusted officer in the American infantry, who enlisted before war 
was declared by our Government — was challenged by a Quaker 
friend, he promptly replied: 'I am showing my regard for my 
Quaker ancestry and training in the fact that I cannot and will 
not allow war to stalk upon the earth unchecked. Only by meeting 
the Devil face to face can we hope to crush him.' " 

Sir George Adam Smith in'an American address stated that in 
Scotland 90 per cent of the ministers' sons of military age entered 
the army before conscription. Would it be strange if some fathers 
decided to go with them.? He also said that of the sixty thousand 
Catholic priests engaged in war work in France, twenty-five thou- 
sand are fighting in the ranks. Some Chinese missionaries are 
serving behind the lines as officers of detachments of Chinese 
artisans and laborers. Other missionaries, however, and sons of 
missionaries are reported to have gone directly into military ser- 
vice. Our country's Roll of Honor contains the names of men like 
Captain Jewett Williams, an Episcopal rector and the son-in-law 
of Dr. David J. Barrows, Chancellor of the University of Georgia, 
who declined a chaplaincy, trained at Fort Oglethorpe, and was 
killed in action. Of recent graduates and members of the Yale 
School of Religion, forty-four are now in khaki. Of these nineteen 
are chaplains and Y. M. C. A. workers, while eighteen are in the 
regular army, one each in the British and Canadian armies, two 
in the Ambulance Corps, one in aviation and one in the navy. 
Already the School Roll of Honor bears one name, that of a young 
Englishman of rare promise, who died in the hospital from wounds 
received on the battlefields of France. 

These men are following in the footsteps of ministers of other 
generations. Yale's records show that there is scarcely a campaign 
of note, or an important battle in American history, in which her 



THE MINISTRY AND THE WAR 89 

sons among the clergy did not share the hardships and dangers 
of the soldier's lot. Besides the more than one hundred and thirty 
who served as chaplains, in the thick of the fight as well as in 
camp and hospital, are those who fought shoulder to shoulder 
with their parishioners. When the news of the approach of the 
enemy reached Thomas Brockway (1768) during service, he dis- 
missed his congregation, shouldered his long gun, and marched 
away. Of John Cleaveland (1745) it is said that he preached all 
the men of his parish into the army and then went himself. They 
helped to take Louisburg in the campaign against Cape Breton 
Island. They marched in the Crown Point Expedition, fought at 
Ticonderoga, and shared with Wolfe the hardships of the cam- 
paign against Quebec. The record of the Revolutionary days is 
a stirring one. Edmund Foster (1778) joined the Minute Men 
on the sounding of the alarm in Lexington. Ebenezer Mosely 
(1763) enlisted in Israel Putnam's regiment, and with Joseph 
Badger (1785), who served with General Arnold in Canada, 
fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill. They were in the ranks at 
Germantown and at Monmouth. Samuel Eells (1765) was elected 
the captain of a company formed among his parishioners to aid 
General Washington, who was then retreating through New 
Jersey. Elisha Scott Williams (1775) crossed the Delaware in 
the boat with Washington, and is so depicted in Trumbull's 
painting. He also fought at the battles of White Plains, Trenton 
and Princeton, and shared with William Stone (1785) and Benja- 
min Wooster (1790) the hardships and sufferings at Valley Forge. 
Levi Lankton (1777) was present at Burgoyne's surrender. 

In the Civil War this record is repeated. The ministers of Yale 
fought at Bull Run, South Mountain, Antietam, Fredericksburg, 
Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spottsylvania and 
Cold Harbor. They rode with Sheridan's cavalry in the Army of 
the Potomac; they marched with General Sherman to the sea. 
Several, like Erastus Blakeslee (1863), well known for his services 
to the work of the Sunday school, rose to the rank of general. 



90 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

Moses Smith (1852) entered in 1865 with the first troops into 
Richmond, while Samuel W, Eaton (1842), after fighting in some 
of the hardest battles, was present at Appomattox Court House on 
the surrender of General Lee. 

In all this there is no thought of glorifying war, or of haloing 
the head of the minister who lays down his Bible to take up his 
bayonet. Quite the contrary. These fighting chaplains condemned 
war and hated it. They never proclaimed that organized slaughter 
was a sane method of settling international disputes or ethical 
questions. They would have marched to their own Calvaries gladly 
if this would have saved them from the horror of the task 
of the soldier and at the same time helped to bring in the Kingdom 
of God. But to their minds there was a time when a Christian 
ought to put up his sword, and another when his duty was to buy 
one. Devilishness is not usually overcome by allowing the Devil 
to have his way. If the powers of evil attempt by force to over- 
throw righteousness, righteousness may well by force oppose and 
thwart them ; not that it may escape martyrdom, or vent its 
anger, but with the clear purpose of rescuing the evil doer from 
his devastating delusion, and of saving the most precious treasures 
of civilization from the axe of a vandalism, which can and ought 
to be restrained. The thought finds a crude but characteristic 
expression in Kipling's poem of Mulholland, the coarse sailor, 
who, in fulfilment of the vow made during a storm on the cattle- 
ship, goes back to preach religion to the brutal and unsympathetic 



I didn't want to do it^ for I knew what I should get, 

An' I wanted to preach religion, handsome an' out of the wet; 

But the Word of the Lord were lain on me, and I done what I was set. 

I have been smit and bruised, as warned would be the case. 
An' turned my cheek to the smiter, exactly as Scripture says ; 
But following that, I knocked him down an' led him up to grace. 



THE MINISTRY AND THE WAR 91 

An' we have preaching on Sundays whenever the sea is calm^ 
An' I use no knife nor pistol^ an' I never take no harm; 
For the Lord abideth back of me to guide my fighting arm. 

It is devoutly to be wished that it was never necessary for the 
preacher to use knife or pistol; but at present apparently there 
is no other means by which the smiter may be knocked down. 

This teaching is what might be called, in Dr. Van Dyke's 
phrase, "Fighting for Peace." It is the kind of militant pacifism 
which Paul hints at. "If it be possible, as much as in you lieth, 
be at peace with all men." Sometimes it is not possible. It is 
neither wise nor saintly to attempt to negotiate with a tiger. It 
would be something worse than folly to allow the I. W. W. to 
dictate the economic policy of our country, or to suffer philo- 
sophical and practical anarchism to work its will with the law 
and order of the world. War as mere war deserves all the vitriolic 
epithets which have been heaped upon it. It is the scourge of 
scourges, the father of piracy and of murder, the mother of havoc, 
desolation and woe. It stands clearly revealed as "a monstrous 
crime, man's crowning imbecility and folly." But when through 
war the attempt is made to tear down law, overthrow justice and 
shackle the world's liberty, shall not war be met by war in order 
to preserve these priceless possessions, and perchance end all wars 
by rendering its mad champions powerless. ^^ No minister can be 
called Christian who does not hate war. But most of them hate 
still more the sinking of the Lusitania, the rape of Belgium, the 
massacre of the peaceful people of Armenia. They cannot with 
clear conscience sit still and watch the fulfilment of the plot of 
"the Potsdam gang" without striking a blow. Peace proposals 
from the successful marauders sound to them too much like Dr. 
Van Dyke's imaginary conversation between an outraged house- 
holder and his triumphant pacifistic burglar. It is not a question 
of Christ or Cassar. There is something of the Sermon on the 
Mount in pacifist and militarist alike. But in the choice our 
ministers in the army have registered their vote for what seems 



92 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

to be by far the lesser of two evils. They with their fellows have 
chosen to tread the new Via Sacra, as the road is now called 
which made the salvation of Verdun possible; and today they 
stand facing the forces of autocracy, greed and military oppres- 
sion, uttering that great battle cry which broke from the heart 
of France, "They shall not pass !" 

Whatever the verdict of history upon this decision of brave 
men in the ministry, certain effects of the war upon them and 
upon their work are sure. These again are both good and evil. 
On the debit side of the ledger will be the loss of many in whose 
future service lay much of the hope and strength of the church. 
A large proportion of the best men, who were looking forward 
to the ministry, are in the training camps and trenches. Some 
may now be diverted to other callings ; some will never come back. 
Their vacant places in the ranks will be saddening and for a time 
crippling. Great tasks which might have been done must needs be 
left undone. New Elishas will wear the prophet's mantle; but 
the memory of many a vanished face will waken the old cry upon 
their lips : "My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and the 
horsemen thereof!" If the church does not begrudge them, it will 
mourn them among its multitude of sons who 

laid the world away; poured out the red, 
Sweet wine of youth: gave up the years to be 
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene 
That men call age; and those who would have been 
Their sons they gave — their immortality. 

A second regrettable result in the minds of some will be the 
discrediting of the ministry. There have been too many un- 
christian utterances from the pulpits of all lands, though we are 
naturally especially sensitive to those "made in Germany" ; too 
many petty, superstitious prayers addressed to tribal deities as 
little like the God of Jesus as Moloch and Mars; too reckless 
dealing with "high literary explosives" on the part of preachers 



THE MINISTRY AND THE WAR 93 

possessing neither the wisdom of Solomon nor the restraint of 
Paul; too flamboyantly patriotic utterances from orators who 
apparently forgot their obligations as citizens of heaven and 
makers of a new world. So far as the writer knows, there have 
been no blasphemies from the pulpits of the Allies equal to the 
saying of Pastor W. Lehmann : "The German soul is God's soul ; 
it shall and will rule over mankind" ; or that still more brutal and 
unblushing pronouncement of Pastor D. Baumgarten : "Whoever 
cannot prevail upon himself to approve from the bottom of his 
heart the sinking of the 'Lusitania,' whoever cannot conquer his 
sense of the gigantic cruelty to unnumbered innocent victims, and 
give himself up to the honest delight at the victorious exploit of 
German defensive power — him we judge to be no true German." 
But if none have descended to these depths of theological blind- 
ness and ethical madness, there has been a certain kinship with 
the spirit of the imprecatory psalms, used as convenient and 
refreshing outlets for pent-up tempers, together with more or 
less pagan treatment of ethical and religious questions, camou- 
flaged with felicitous phrases, which lulled the listener with the 
assurance that the preacher was quoting from the Litany. All 
this has not redounded to the respect of the thoughtful for the 
pulpit, or for the leadership of men supposed to be specialists in 
the rules of right and teachers of the counsels of a fatherly God. 
Furthermore, while the mass of Christian unity and cooperation 
has been unprecedented, there have been here and there expres- 
sions of denominational rivalries. It is not an inspiring spectacle 
when a few — and fortunately only a few — bigoted denomination- 
alists are seen storming certain camps, not because the religious 
welfare of the soldiers is not being amply cared for, but because 
the accredited purveyor of their ecclesiastical shibboleth is not 
teaching his patois and peddling his wares. Neither our best lay- 
men nor our wisest religious leaders have either patience or sym- 
pathy with modern denominational Pharisees. They recognize 
temperamental, psychological and national differences among 



94 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

fellow Christians, and are content that Quaker and High Church- 
man, shouting Methodist and dignified Scotch Presbyterian, Sal- 
vation Army lassie and devout Romanist should choose their own 
liturgy and polity, and go to heaven each in his own way. But to 
their minds, in everyday life usually and in camp life always, 
sectarian squabbling and doctrinal hair-splitting are merely 
rocks of stumbling and stones of offense; and whenever they wit- 
ness, especially in war time, such wrangling in the porch of the 
sanctuary, they discount the utterances and even the calling of 
the minister, and, instead of entering the edifice and joining in 
the service, pass by on the other side. 

Still more damning will be the accusation, made even by loyal 
sons of the church's own household, that not only has the ministry 
failed to prevent war, but that it neglected to mass its forces and 
measure its might in the great task. To reply to the charge in 
its undiscriminating, blunderbuss form is easy. Many ministers 
gave up their lives to the cause, notably in the various forms of 
the peace movement. Others proclaimed and urged a cure, which 
the laity declined to put into operation and the governments 
ignored. The prevention of war should have been the work of the 
educator, the lawyer, the scientist, the promoters of commerce and 
the prophets of international socialism as well as of the minister. 
If he is blameworthy, so are they. Men who love to sit in the seat 
of the scornful and jeer at Christianity should enlarge the scope 
of their humor. If, as G. K. Chesterton puts it, "Christianity has 
not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and 
not tried," it is equally true that the ministry has not been 
trusted and found incompetent; it has been the herald of an 
unwelcome message and ignored. No one class in the community 
could work the miracle of a world-peace ; it could be wrought only 
through the faith and works of all. To attribute to the ministers 
the failure to achieve it is in part fair; some of them are guilty. 
As Dean Hodges said of the much-discussed article, "Peter Sat 
by the Fire Warming Himself," the charges are richly deserved 



THE MINISTRY AND THE WAR 95 

by those by whom they are deserved. In part, however, it is mani- 
festly unfair; multitudes honestly tried. In part it is one of the 
greatest compliments ever paid them ; for it suggests their power, 
acknowledges their leadership, and honors their task as the con- 
structive statesmen of the world. No one ever before hinted that 
the clergy ought to have stopped the wars of Charlemagne or of 
Napoleon. During the Civil War neither the conflict nor the cause 
was laid at the minister's door. But in our day many clamor for 
priests after the order of Joshua as well as of Moses, men at the 
head of great bodies of Christian soldiers, who shall participate 
vigorously in domestic politics and international relations, until 
they actually bring in the reign of righteousness and of love and 
truth among men. As ministers we accept the compliment while 
we confess our sins and shortcomings. The burthen of having done 
the things we ought not to have done and of having left undone 
the things which we ought to haA^e done is one that we carry 
shamefacedly but not exclusively. It is shared by all mankind. 

But if the war kills some and discredits others, the credit page 
in the ledger looms large. The experiences and tasks of the present 
can hardly fail to make the manliest among us still more virile 
and vigorous. They will purge the leaders in every profession of 
all softness and sentimentalism, and lift them above a great danger 
in peace times, that of living a 

ghastly, smooth life^ dead at heart. 

No sane and unprejudiced mind, possessing first-hand knowledge 
of the ministry, accepts as a representative of the profession the 
clergyman of the stage comedy and the popular novel. He may 
be a "sport," in the biological sense ; but it would be equally easy 
to find as ludicrous and despicable examples in law, medicine or 
business. So far as the average, normal type is concerned, this 
popular clerical clown is a wretched caricature, possessing humor 
because endowed with the exaggeration and distortion of a politi- 
cal cartoon. But removing all such weaklings from the discussion, 



96 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

and granting that there are no more lax fellows, lolling through 
life, in the ministry than in any other profession, there isj as 
Donald Hankey points out, a certain directness and sternness in 
camp and military life which is singularly invigorating and even 
Christ-like. It stiffens a man's back to shoulder heavy burdens, 
trains the eye to face steadily and without flinching disagreeable 
and terrifying duties. It tenses muscles with great and glorious 
resolves. It girds up the loins for a race the issues of which are 
life and death, throttles any idea of sneaking sinuously through 
the world avoiding large and costly obligations, and at the end 
of the day's labor demands visible and tangible results. If any 
minister was in danger of becoming what Horace Greeley called 
"a pretty man," or what Holmes described as "a wailing poitri- 
naire," his experience as chaplain and as soldier will effectually 
cure him. We should have more prophets after the order of Amos 
as well as of Hosea when the men who have been under fire come 
home. 

Such men will increasingly merit and possess the respect of 
laymen and of soldiers. Their lives have been knit together in the 
fellowship of suffering. Their bodies are inured to the same hard- 
ships, their faces lined with the same grim marks of dangers 
laughed at and of conquered pain. In the democracy of the trenches 
the sons of the Pilgrims and the immigrant sons of the slums have 
come to know and to understand one another. The pagan, illiterate 
dock-hand has fought shoulder to shoulder with the teacher of 
religion, trained in the first universities of our own and other 
lands. When such laymen attend plays like "The Hypocrites" or 
read novels like "The Pastor's Wife," they will never be per- 
suaded that the clerical cartoons represent reality. Each will 
recall days in the dugouts and nights in the hospitals, when they 
came to know a different type of minister, a "beloved captain," 
who marched through the mire with song and laughter, and crept 
with them through the darkness and shadow of death in No Man's 
Land. An almost irresistible attraction will draw them to the 



THE MINISTRY AND THE WAR 97 

churches of such ministers. To their leadership they will be in- 
clined to render obedience; to their messages they will listen with 
respect. No scoffing jests at the minister will be allowed to go by 
them unchallenged. For the first time in their lives they have been 
brought into touch with the preachers of religion, and their hearts 
have burned within them while they talked with these disciples of 
Jesus by the way. 

Furthermore, they will seek them out in the intercourse of 
ordinary fellowship. For the ministers have shown themselves 
friendly, approachable — no wan ascetics, no unhuman monks or 
superstitious other-worldlings, but jolly good fellows in camp 
life, sane and wholesome counsellors in times of perplexity, com- 
forters in the hours of sorrow, efficient and tireless fellow workers ; 
in brief, the best type of men among men. With such a minister 
there will be no social uneasiness, no camouflaged conversation 
during a pastoral visit or upon his entrance into the club. When 
he opens the front door, the father will not be so apt to call, 
"Mother, the dominie has come to see you!" It will be no longer 
the pastor who wishes to meet and to know the male parishioner ; 
the male parishioner will be equally eager to meet and to know 
the pastor. One soldier phrased the difference in this way: "Well, 
sir, I like our services out here, and the church is all right ; but 
our parson at home, sir — ! You couldn't go to church or have 
anything to do with him!" All this will come to the minister as 
a reward for having realized the picture as painted by an English 
chaplain. "I like to think of the parish priest as fulfilling the 
Shakespearean stage direction — 'Scene : a public place. Enter 
First Citizen' ; — for his ministry should mostly be spent neither in 
church nor in the homes of the faithful, but in public places ; and 
he should be the First Citizen of his parish, sufficiently well known 
to all to be absolutely at home with each. . . . And so the word 
'parson' will revert to its old proud meaning of 'persona,' and the 
priest will take in his parish a position analogous to that of the 
best chaplains in the army." That is the gift which true ministers 



98 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

have always coveted. Many have already won it, turning from the 
fascination of their studies "to waste time wisely in the market- 
place, gossiping like Socrates with all comers." After the war 
many more will possess it, having gladly paid the price. 

To the spiritual practitioner, moreover, will have come increased 
skill in that most difficult of all arts, personal work. He will have 
had daily hospital training in ministering to the souls of men. 
He will speak their language, even their lingo, rather than what 
is to multitudes the unintelligible patois of the seminary Canaan. 
He will know not only his own theories but their difficulties and 
experiences in regard to a belief in immortality and the practice 
of prayer. Like Jesus at the well, he will have learned the method 
and value of gaining a point of contact in teaching. Formerly it 
was easy to discourse from the pulpit concerning the being and 
nature of God and to champion theories of the atonement. The 
prophet of the regiment will have learned what is far more difficult 
and more necessary — to persuade a man to follow the teaching 
and to practice the friendship of Jesus. That is his task, and he 
"will have become efficient in its accomplishment— so to bring 
modern prodigals to themselves that they loathe the far country, 
and arise, and go home to their Father's house. 

Another gain will be that of a deeper appreciation of denomi- 
national cooperation and an enlarged scope for the practice of 
it. Sectarian rivalries and ecclesiastical trivialities vanish in the 
trenches. Man-made walls between Christian brethren are crum- 
bling. Petty partisanship becomes first ridiculous and then wicked 
in the light of the universal church's ambition. "We need a 
standard so universal," writes H. G. Wells, "that the plate-layer 
may say to the barrister or the duchess, or the Red Indian to the 
Limehouse sailor, or the Anzac soldier to the Sinn Feiner or the 
Chinaman, 'What are we two doing for it.?' And to fill the place 
of that 'It' no other idea is great enough or commanding enough, 
but only the world Kingdom of God." The same buildings are 
now serving congregations of Jews, Protestants and Romanists. 



THE MINISTRY AND THE WAR 99 

Instant calls come when rabbis, priests, rectors, and representa- 
tives of every hue in the rainbow of Protestantism minister to men 
of other creeds and of no creed. Partisan politics in the field of 
pure religion are seen to be essentially irreligious ; and chaplains 
of every ilk and kirk are working together like "Bill' and "Alf," 
two cockney soldiers, one of whom had lost a right arm and the 
other a left. They always sat side by side at the C. C. S. concerts 
"so as we can have a clap," as "Alf" put it. "Bill puts 'is 'and 
out, an' I smacks it with mine." Such men cannot come home and 
take part in the heresy trials and ecclesiastical hecklings of men 
whom at heart they recognize as Christian brethren. It is per- 
fectly safe to prophesy that there, will be more of church unity, 
and possibly more of uniformity, so far as this is desirable, when 
these apostles of hundreds of churches come home from the war. 
With this enlarged cooperation will come also an enlarged ambi- 
tion. The pastor who has been plodding along the familiar ways of 
an uninspiring parish will never be content to suffer his people to 
travel in the old ruts or to countenance out-worn and inefficient 
methods. That way, he now knows, lies ministerial melancholia 
and the present situation, something far worse than Lear's mad- 
ness. His task, and that of his people, is nothing less than to 
transform their portion of the world into heaven. Singing and 
praying about it are good and necessary; but in the words of the 
old negro spiritual, it is perfectly patent that "Eberybody talks 
'bout heaben ain't a-gwine dah," and the work of the church is 
to see to it that they go. Some of the strongest and most venture- 
some among the clergy, unwilling to turn back to the safe life after 
the thrill of the trenches, will seek adventure in pioneer work in 
our own land and abroad. Home missions will come as a challenge 
to men inured to danger and hardship. Foreign missions will have 
a new and poignant meaning for all the world. We knew before 
that the bubonic plague in Calcutta was a menace to San Fran- 
cisco ; we know now that the cult of militarism in a single group 
in Germany can crucify mankind. No chaplain will ever settle 



100 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

down into a parish as if it were a "pent-up Utica." No cultivation 
of individual piety will atone for the failure to Christianize 
society, leaven industry with the principles of Jesus, and convert 
from its Machiavellian heathendom and Bismarckian brutality 
the diplomacy of the old-time state. Nothing less than the 
ambition to take the world and its kingdoms for Christ can ever 
satisfy his soldiers ; not, like the Central Powers, in order that 
they may be enslaved and exploited, but that they may know the 
fullness of joy and of freedom, and possess the true riches of 
that divine life which is life indeed. 

Almost of necessity the experience at the front will simplify 
and vitalize the minister's message. For many all discussion of 
the future of unbaptized infants, and premillenialism, and the 
verbal inspiration of the Pentateuch had long ago lost interest. 
In the minds of others, matters regarded by some earnest Chris- 
. tians as of vital importance, like the Virgin Birth and the physical 
resurrection of Jesus, had ceased to function. To them Jesus 
would still be the unique Son of God, the divine Saviour of the 
world, whatever the method of his human generation; and he 
would still be alive, their unseen friend and present helper, 
whether or not his body had remained in the tomb. Belief or dis- 
belief in such articles of faith would never transform a demon 
into a saint or a saint into a demon. Even to those accepting 
them, they had no visible effect upon character or upon the course 
of ordinary daily life. No soldiers ever asked about such scholastic 
problems as they faced going over the top on the morrow. In the 
hospital they never mentioned them, as they lay lonely and fearful 
on their beds of pain. But they did ask, or long to ask, had shyness 
not prevented them, about the treasures for which the heart 
hungers and to which religion alone holds the key. 

"Dear Sir," wrote a wounded soldier to the chaplain of his 
battalion; "I often used to wish that you would talk seriously 
and privately to me about religion, though I never dared to ask 
you, and I must admit that I seemed to be very antagonistic when 



THE MINISTRY AND THE WAR 101 

you did start." "I wish you'd tell me what you think about 
it, padre," said another. "Is there anything really after- 
wards ? . . . I'd like you to tell me as man to man what you really 
think about it. Do we go on living afterwards in any sort of way 
or — !" He struck a match to light a cigarette. A gust of wind, 
which carried a gust of snow round our legs, blew the match out 
again. I daresay it was that which suggested his next words : 
"Or do we just go out.? I know the creed," he went on. ". . . But 
that's not what I want. I want to know what you really believe 
yourself, as a man, you know." 

Is there a God, and can we actually lead men to experience 
him and to grow like him.'^ Is there any power in Jesus to save 
a brute and a drunkard, a selfish worldling and a contented prig, 
not from a hell of fire after death from which he is snatched by 
some theological transaction, but from his degradation and mean- 
ness in the present, until he is fit to be a husband and a father, 
a patriot and a friend .^^ Are the fruits of the Christian spirit 
"love, joy, peace, long-suffering, goodness, meekness, faithful- 
ness, and self-control," the qualities of character which alone can 
make heaven anywhere, and without which a potential Paradise 
would be transformed into an actual hell.'' Are the wages of sin 
death, or does the good man simply lose a deal of fun and prove 
himself to be a foolish prig and superstitious other- wo riding .? 
Does death end all, or are there many mansions in the Father's 
house? Such are the great questions; and to them Christianity 
has very definite answers, capable of being tried out in experience. 
In the past much of so-called religion has seemed to thoughtful 
minds remote from the facts of life, unreal, a bit queer if not 
abnormal. If the flames of war are purging it from such unreali- 
ties and abnormalities, the facts which lie at the heart of the 
world's faith are being saved, yet so as by fire. The Christianity 
of the camp is no pious sentimentalism, no sweet dream or unvirile 
worship of a "gentle Jesus." It is a living, indubitable experience, 
full of strength and of joy. Men are fighting to the death a 



102 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

thought and a purpose in the German armies which Prince 
Lichnowsky, their own ambassador to the British Court, charac- 
terized as "perfidy and the sin against the Holy Ghost" ; and in 
that fight they hunger and thirst for the power of a religion of 
the Spirit, which — however the battle of bodies and of brute 
force may be decided — in God's good time is bound to win the day. 

The last effect of the war upon the work and message of the 
minister will be to furnish it with a new dynamic. As he returns 
from the battle with sin in the trenches, he will find in the same 
battle at home William James' "moral equivalent for war." The 
call to arms has revealed the fact, seen in the success of the 
Student Volunteer Movement, that the church has not sufficiently 
appealed to men's latent heroism. The ordinary individual has 
revealed an enthusiastic readiness for high adventure and an 
almost limitless capacity for self-sacrifice, qualities upon which 
the work and preaching of the average parish made practically 
negligible demands. There was a contrast as noticeable as it was 
lamentable between the pompous phrases of certain militant 
hymns, sung chiefly by the choir, and the lack of ethical passion 
and aggressive righteousness on the part of the pews. There was 
too little doing of brave deeds and too much flabby irresolution 
and orthodox laziness. Christianity seemed to act as a narcotic 
rather than a stimulant. Any preacher might say to any congre- 
gation with perfect safety, "Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, 
striving against sin." 

For the chaplain fresh from the front all this will be changed. 
Not only will he be the flaming apostle of a new enthusiasm; his 
church will have been saved from the old lethargy and lukewarm- 
ness of Laodicea, the minds of his people purged from the dolce 
far niente pietism, which dreamed sweet dreams while the 
wreckers of the world prepared for war. For today religion 
stands revealed as the greatest of all adventures. Christianity is 
history's crowning crusade. The greed, the brutality, the imbecile 
and devilish lawlessness, which have revelled in an orgy of spiritual 



THE MINISTRY AND THE WAR 103 

vandalism, are not peculiar to war. They have long been with us, 
in city and in country, in the slums and on the avenue, among 
peoples supposed to be civilized and enjoying the blessings of an 
era of prosperity and of peace. It was an amazed world, rudely 
roused from its comfortable slumbers, which found these forces 
organized for battle ; it will be a bloody and dishevelled but 
determined and aggressive world that, when our men have laid 
aside their khaki, will strive to hold them in the ranks of an 
equally fearless and fighting army, which will never retreat from 
its trenches until these enemies of the world's peace and happiness 
are driven from the field. Men who hated dirt and discomfort, 
blood and vermin, have endured and laughed at them for the sake 
of their cause and their country. When the call comes to carry 
on the same fight in the homeland, such heroic souls will scarcely 
decline to sacrifice something of their peace and comfort, or to 
attack the forces entrenched in saloon and dive and political cave 
of Adullam, because in the struggle they may be shorn of delights 
and dollars, know the shame and agony of temporary defeat, and 
as victors find themselves with mire upon their garments and 
blood upon their hands. "Never was there a religion more com- 
bative than Christianity," wrote Bernhardi. That is false as the 
apostle of carnage meant it ; but it is true to the disciple of Jesus, 
who has heard Paul's summons to don the full panoply of the 
Christian armor, and who so loves the Lord as to hate evil with 
the just but terrible wrath of the Lamb. Here is a new dynamic, 
an irresistible appeal, which should and must be utilized by the 
minister. If the Christian Church is an army with the greatest 
of fights on its hands, there will be a place for the soldier. With 
the church service of the religious slacker he may be pardoned 
if he declines to have anything to do. 

T. R. Glover in "The Jesus of History" has said that the Chris- 
tian conquered because he out-lived and out-thought and out-died 
the pagan. It is beginning to dawn upon the ministry that we 
must out-fight him, if he is to be conquered in our day. The clergy 



104 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

have seen their opportunity pictured in the words with which 
John Masefield in "Gallipoli" has told the story of the final attack 
upon Suvla Bay. "There was the storm," he writes, "there was 
the crisis, the one picked hour, to which this death and agony . . . 
had led. Then was the hour for the casting off of self, and a 
setting aside of every pain and longing and sweet affection, a 
giving up of all that makes a man to the something which makes 
a race, and a going forth to death resolvedly to help out their 
brothers high above in the shell bursts and the blazing gorse." 
The thousands who are responding to that call are the priests 
of today and the prophets of tomorrow. They can cry to us, 
with their fellow soldiers, living and dead, in the words of 
Lawrence Binyon : 

O you that still have rain and sun. 

Kisses of children and of wife. 

And the good earth to tread upon, 

And the mere sweetness that is life. 
Forget not us who gave all these 
For something dearer, and for you ! 
Think in what cause we crossed the seas ! 
. Remember, he who fails the challenge 
Fails us, too. 

Now in the hour that shows the strong — 

The soul no evil powers affray — 
Drive straight against embattled Wrong: 

Faith knows but one, the hardest, way. 
Endure; the end is worth the throw. 
Give, give ; and dare, and again dare ! 
On, to the Wrong's great overthrow ! 
We are with you, of you; we the pain and 
Victory share. 



VI 

THE EFFECT OF THE WAR UPON RELIGIOUS 
EDUCATION 

LUTHER ALLAN WEIGLE 

The term "religious education" stands for two ideas that are 
ultimately one: for the inclusion of religion in our educational 
program, and for the use of educational methods in the propa- 
gation of religion from generation to generation. 

Over seventy years ago, Horace Bushnell pointed out the folly 
of reliance upon the revival method of dealing with the children 
of Christian homes, and urged the educational method of Chris- 
tian nurture. He did more than any other one man to determine 
the present trend in religious education. Yet his work was 
prophetic ; it took fifty years more of "ostrich nurture," as he 
called it, to reveal to Christian people generally the full truth 
of his position. 

The past twenty years, however, have witnessed a great move- 
ment among the Protestant churches of America toward clearer 
aims and better methods in religious education. A situation had 
developed that bid fair to let religion drop out of the education 
of American children. Changed social, economic and industrial 
conditions had transferred to the school many of the educational 
functions once fulfilled by the home, and had wrought a change 
in the forms of family religion. The public schools had become 
increasingly secular in aim, in control, and in material taught. 
The development of science and philosophy in independence of 
religion had made it possible for college students to get the idea 
that religion is not a significant part of the life and culture of 



106 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

the time. The Sunday school, indeed, was at work, teaching 
children of God and his will. But its curriculum was ungraded, 
its teachers untrained, and its instruction limited to one period 
of half an hour in each week. 

Roughly speaking, the beginning of the present century may 
be taken as the date when the Christian people of America began 
to awake to the danger involved in this situation. As early as the 
late eighties. President W. R. Harper, then Woolsey Professor 
of Biblical Literature at Yale, had organized the American 
Institute of Sacred Literature, and had begun to publish a graded 
series of Inductive Studies in the Bible. In 1900, under his leader- 
ship, the University of Chicago published the first of its present 
series of Constructive Studies, which provides text-books for a 
graded curriculum of religious education. In 1903, the Religious 
Education Association was organized, its membership drawn 
from the whole of the United States and Canada, and its purpose 
declared to be threefold: "To inspire the educational forces of 
our country with the religious ideal ; to inspire the religious forces 
of our country with the educational ideal; and to keep before the 
public mind the ideal of religious education, and the sense of its 
need and value." In 1908, the International Sunday School Asso- 
ciation authorized its Lesson Committee to construct and issue 
a graded series of Sunday school lessons in addition to the uni- 
form series which it had issued year after year since 1872. In 
1910 the Sunday School Council of Evangelical Denominations 
was organized, a mark of the more definite assumption by the 
several denominations of responsibility for the educational work 
of their Sunday schools and for the training of teachers. In 1912, 
the Council of Church Boards of Education came into being, 
which has devoted its energies thus far mainly to cooperative 
effort in behalf of Christian colleges and for the religious welfare 
of college and university students generally. 

These are but a few outstanding factors in a movement greater 
far than any single organization or group of organizations. There 



EFFECT UPON RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 107 

has been an awakening of the spirit of education in religion. 
Sunday schools the country over have been graded, and here and 
there week-day schools of religion have been begun ; problems of 
curriculum, method and organization have been studied and 
graded curricula devised; classes and schools for' the training 
of teachers have been organized; and attempts of various sorts 
have been made to correlate public and religious education. 
Churches in general have come to see that they have an educational 
as well as a religious function in the community, and that there 
is a sense in which they share with the public school a common 
task. The public school can teach the "three R's," the sciences, 
arts and vocations ; the church must teach religion. Both are 
needed if the education of our children is to be complete. Many 
churches are employing paid teachers of religion and directors 
of religious education. Courses in religious education have been 
organized and professorships of religious education established 
in colleges and theological seminaries. "The Educational Ideal 
in the Christian Ministry" was the subject of the Lyman Beecher 
Lectures on Preaching, in the Yale School of Religion, a few 
years ago. The young men who are entering the Christian ministry 
in these days are being trained, not simply to preach and to care 
for a parish, but to teach and to direct the educational work of 
a church. 

The immediate effect of the war has been to retard this move- 
ment in some degree. Preoccupation with the war itself and with 
more immediately pressing needs, has made more difficult the 
work of the churches in this as in other respects. Churches that 
had planned new buildings for their schools are postponing their 
erection till the war is over. Training classes for teachers are 
harder to keep up. Ministers are going into war service ; and 
those who stay at home are doing double work or more. Churches, 
like business houses and factories, have found their organizations 
broken by the departure of members of military age. Many of 
their best teachers and leaders have gone to war; and it is not 



108 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

easy, in these days of urgency and stress, to discover others to 
take their places. 

It is probable, however, that a deeper effect of the war will 
be to intensify our sense of the importance of religious education 
and to clarify the church's educational program, in point both of 
content and method. This conviction rests upon these funda- 
mental facts : that the world is achieving democracy ; that it 
believes in and relies upon education; that it is experiencing what 
may prove to be a renewal of religion. 

Education, democracy, religion — these three, we have long 
professed and more or less fully believed, belong together. The 
full life of each of the three is bound up in that of the other two. 

Education without religion is incomplete and abortive; it falls 
short of that life more abundant which is education's goal. Reli- 
gion without education lacks intelligence and power, and condemns 
itself to what Horace Bushnell called conquest from without, as 
contrasted with growth from within. 

Democracy without education cannot long hold together or be 
saved from mediocrity and caprice. Education without democracy 
perpetuates caste divisions, or else breeds discontent and class 
hatred. 

Democracy without religion is doomed to fail; and religion 
without democracy cannot realize the Fatherhood of God and the 
brotherhood of man. 

These, I say, are familiar convictions. They are natural to 
Protestantism; they have entered into the very making of 
America. Yet just these old convictions are gaining a new force 
and a deeper meaning in and through the experiences of these 
years of war. The struggle for democracy is not only leading us 
to a new comprehension of the meaning of democracy itself; it 
is helping us to understand better both education and religion. 

It does not lie within the limits of this paper to canvass the 
wider and deeper meaning of democracy which is opening before 
us. The messages and addresses of President Wilson have inter- 



EFFECT UPON RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 109 

preted that meaning not simply to America but to the world. No 
one yet knows the full promise of life after the war, when Pan- 
Germanism shall have been not only balked but destroyed. The 
democracy for which we fight to make the world safe will be a 
chastened, changed, completer democracy. It will be a democracy 
between nations as well as within nations, for the doctrine of the 
irresponsible, beyond-moral sovereignty of the state must return 
to the perdition whence it came. It will be a democracy applied 
more fully to the whole of life, social, economic and industrial as 
well as political. It will be a democracy of completer citizenship, 
that gives place to women as to men. It will be a democracy of 
duties as well as of rights. 

The world is acquiring a new conscience. Just as the nineteenth 
century made slavery abhorrent to the moral sense of men in 
general, the twentieth century will likely be looked back to as the 
time when the world's conscience decided that the exploitation 
of man by man is wrong. The general moral sense of men has not 
been over-tender on this point hitherto. They have checkmated 
the exploiter if they could, as they did checkmate Napoleon, but 
they have not always, or even usually, looked upon him as a 
wrong doer. It required Germany's attempts at conquest and 
subjugation to wake the world to the absolute wrong of that 
monstrous thing — that one man should use another as a mere 
means to his own pleasure or aggrandizement, or that one people 
should so determine the destiny of another people. 

Here lies the supreme moral issue of the war. Shall the world, 
which has become a neighborhood, organize itself into a great 
community of mutual respect, good will and brotherhood, or shall 
its structure be that of restless orders of exploiters and ex- 
ploited.'' It is over-f amiliar ; yet, lest we forget, hear some random 
verses from various P^n-Germanist scriptures : "Not to live and 
let live, but to live and direct the lives of others, that is 
power." "To compel men to a state of right, to put them under 
the yoke of right by force, is not only the right but the sacred 



110 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

duty of every man who has the knowledge and the power." "The 
German race is called to bind the earth under its control, to 
exploit the natural resources and the physical powers of man, 
to use the passive races in subordinate capacity for the develop- 
ment of its Kultur." "Life is essentially appropriation, injury, 
conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion 
of its own forms, incorporation at the least, and in its mildest 
form exploitation." 

Contrast with this the words of Jesus : "Ye know that they 
who are accounted to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them; 
and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it is not 
so among you : but whosoever would become great among you, 
shall be your minister; and whosoever would be first among you, 
shall be servant of all." The present struggle is not merely 
between democracy and autocracy as rival systems of govern- 
ment. It is a struggle between opposed philosophies of life. 
Nietzsche was more consistent than the Kaiser who has followed 
him, for Nietzsche did not claim to be a Christian. He frankly 
proposed a "transvaluation of values" which would do away with 
the religion of Jesus as fit only for slaves. That proposed trans- 
valuation of values the Kaiser is trying to bring about, however 
piously he may lie about it or claim God's partnership in his 
enterprise. 

Prophecies are always hazardous ; never more so than now. The 
outlook for religion has been discussed both by puzzled pacifists 
and by facile forecasters of the fulfilment of their own wishes. 
One may perhaps question whether there will be any one trend 
of the churches in the immediate future. Yet this is clear : that 
the interests of democracy and the interests of true religion are 
ultimately one. We may confidently expect the churches of to- 
morrow to realize this more fully, not simply in the ideals they 
preach, but in the temper and quality of their own life. One effect 
of the war upon religious education, undoubtedly, will he to make 
it more democratic in aim, content and method. 



EFFECT UPON RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 111 

Education in general will become more democratic. The expe- 
riences of these years are helping us to understand education and 
to estimate its values. Our eyes are being opened to the diametri- 
cal difference between democratic and undemocratic education. 
We have come to see that the latter may be as great a menace to 
the world as the former is a vital resource. 

The time was, not long ago, when Germany was deemed the 
school-master of the world. German efficiency and German 
obedience to authority were seen to be the products of German 
teachers and German schools. In methods of teaching and in 
school organization, as well as in ideals of scholarship, the world 
sought to follow Germany. If here and there one objected that 
German education seemed to sacrifice the individual to the system 
and to beget an obedience too implicit, we felt that it was only 
because the Germans are such docile, pious, family folk, and we 
rather chided ourselves for our rougher ways and for that self- 
will that made us unholily thankful that we had been born in a 
freer land. 

But now the character of German education stands revealed. 
We are no longer as hopeful as we once were of the possible suc- 
cess of an appeal to the German people over the heads of their 
military masters. They seem on the whole to like the kind of 
government they have, and to want to be exploited by Prussia. 
They are perilously near to what Mr. H. G. Wells has given as 
his definition of damnation — satisfaction with existing things 
when existing things are bad. They are experiencing what Mr. 
Edmond Holmes has called the Nemesis of docility. 

And it is their system of education that has brought about 
this result. If the German people are damned to satisfaction with 
irresponsible autocracy and fatuous docility, their schools have 
damned them. For a century, German education has been at work 
to breed the present world-menace. The German schools have made 
the German people what they are. They have sought to develop 
habits of mind rather than free intelligence ; they have valued 



112 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

efficiency in a given task above initiative and power to think for 
oneself. They have set children in vocational grooves and molded 
them to pattern. They have educated the few to exert authority, 
and have trained the many to obey. They have nurtured the 
young upon hatred of other peoples ; and, much as the Jews of 
old awaited the Messiah, they have lived and labored in expecta- 
tion of "The Day." They have exalted Vaterland into a religion, 
and have degraded God into a German tutelary deity. The German 
schools have welded the German people into a compact, efficient, 
military machine. The desires of the State are their desires ; the 
Kaiser's will is their will. 

We have been following false gods, therefore, in so far as we 
have sought to shape our schools upon German models. "The 
German teacher teaches," wrote one of our great educators some 
years ago, in criticism of our American way of giving to children 
text-book assignments which they are expected to study for 
themselves ; yet the text-book method, fumblingly as we have so 
often used it, gives better training in initiative and intelligence 
than the German teacher's dictation methods. Professor Charles 
H. Judd has recently pointed out the confusion and waste of 
time brought about by the fact that our eight-year elementary 
school was modeled upon the German Volksschule, which is a 
school for the lower classes, and not intended to lead on to higher 
education. Our purpose, on the contrary, is to maintain for every 
American child an open ladder through elementary school, sec- 
ondary school and college to the university; and to that purpose 
a six-year period of elementary education is much better 
adapted — a plan which many of our school systems have adopted 
within the last decade. We need better vocational education in 
this country and better systems of vocational guidance; but we 
are becoming clear that these must not be of the German sort, 
that compel a choice before the teens. 

Education in a democracy must be education for democracy; 
and education for democracy must itself be democratic in content 



EFFECT UPON RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 113 

and method. Such education practices and aims at intelligence 
rather than habit of mind. It trains its pupils to think and choose 
for themselves. It prizes initiative above conformity, responsibility 
above mere efficiency, social good will above unthinking obedience. 

Such education is more difficult, of course, than education of 
the undemocratic type. We shall at times be tempted to fall back 
into the ways of the German schools in some respect or other, 
because they represent the line of least resistance in education. 
Specious arguments will be presented in favor of these ways by 
short-sighted "practical" men. Education of the German type is 
more efficient, they will say ; it is more direct and practical ; it 
brings more immediate results. It is more patriotic, moreover, 
they will insist ; it better serves the ends of authority ; it makes 
people more prosperous and contented, each in his appointed 
niche. But such arguments, we may well hope, will no longer win 
the uncritical assent that they have sometimes found. German 
education may be more efficient in the fulfilment of its end than 
American education — ^but what an end it has sought and reached ! 
In the moment of our temptation to undemocratic short cuts in 
education, we shall henceforth look to the Germany of yesterday 
and today, and shall be strengthened to resist. Her ways are 
not our ways. Her schools cannot be ours. Education must mean 
to America something quite different from what it has meant to 
Germany. 

The contrast between democratic and undemocratic types of 
education is as great with respect to religion as with respect to 
the rest of life. Germany has been most careful to maintain reli- 
gion as a subject of instruction in her schools. But the content 
of this instruction in religion has been intellectualistic and 
formal. It has pressed upon German children a body of historical 
facts, moral precepts and theological dogmas ; but it has not 
begotten the freedom of inward spiritual initiative. State- 
controlled, it has bent religion to state uses, and has in time 



114 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

begotten a generation who can believe in the "good old German 
God." 

Religious education in America has been and will be more 
democratic. Horace Bushnell used to say that the aim of all 
education is the emancipation of the child. We teach and train 
our children in order that they may in due time be set free from 
paternal discipline. We fail in the religious education of our 
children if our teaching does not result in their final emancipation 
from a religion of mere authority and convention and their 
growth into a religion of the spirit. We aim, not simply to win 
their assent to a given body of beliefs or to attach them to the 
church as a saving institution, but to help them to become men 
and women who can think and choose for themselves. The Prot- 
estant principle of the universal priesthood of believers involves 
democracy in religion. And just as democracy can look forward 
only to failure unless it can educate its citizens, Protestantism 
will fail unless it can educate men and women fit to stand on their 
own feet before God, able to understand his will and ready to 
enter intelligently and effectively into the common human enter- 
prises of Christian living. 

A second effect of the war, closely related to this, is that reli- 
gious education will concern itself more directly with life, and 
will put less emphasis upon dogma, especially upon those refine- 
ments of creed which have operated divisively in the life of the 
Christian Church. Its method will be more vital, and less intel- 
lectualistic. Instead of proceeding upon the assumption that true 
belief comes first and that right life is the expression of prior 
belief, it will recognize that adequate insight and true belief are 
more often the result of right life and action. "If any man willeth 
to do his will, he shall know of the teaching." If this be true of 
adults, it is even more true of children. Our plans of religious 
education will first seek to influence the life, and will deal with 
beliefs as an explanation of life's purposes and motives and an 
interpretation of its realities and values. 



EFFECT UPON RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 115 

If they will realize this primacy of life, the Christian churches 
stand in the presence of a great opportunity. The experiences of 
these years have shown us how much more of Christian living 
there is in the world than bears the label. Religion is being tested, 
stripped of sham and embroidery, and reduced to reality. And 
there are being revealed breadths and depths of real religion that 
we had not understood. There is a vast amount of inarticulate 
religion actually moving the lives of men which the churches may 
lift to the level of intelligent and articulate belief if they will but 
approach it with understanding and a willingness to be taught 
as well as to teach. 

In Jesus' story of the last judgment, there is surprise all 
around. Both those on the right hand and those on the left stand 
fully revealed to themselves for the first time, it seems. "Lord, 
when saw we thee . . ." they cry on both sides. This war has 
constituted such a judgment day. A great moral issue has stood 
out, sharp, clean-cut and clear. It has set men on the right hand 
and on the left. It brooks no moral hyphenates ; it permits no half- 
allegiance, either to country or to God. Beneath all pretense and 
profession, it lays bare the real man. It reveals the hidden quali- 
ties of nations. There have been many surprises. It has shown far 
more of evil in the world that we had deemed possible; but it has 
shown, too, far more of goodness and courage and true religion 
than we had thought was there. 

Evil is here— real, powerful, poignant, and more unutterably 
bad than the farthest stretch of imagination had hitherto con- 
ceived that evil could be. Since the world began it was never so 
full of pain and suffering in body and mind, of needless death and 
of mothers brave but broken-hearted. And most of this is the 
result of supreme moral evil, the work of a power deliberately 
seeking world-domination and exploitation of the rest of man- 
kind, even though it involve the extermination of other peoples, 
determined to use any methods that bid fair to bring about this 



116 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

result, and organizing deceit and lust and murder as the instru- 
ments of S chrecMichkeit . 

But goodness is here too — strong, calm, cheerful, brave, self- 
devoting goodness. These years of war have revealed to us thej 
supreme power of the human spirit to endure pain, to resist evil, 
and to count all else naught for sake of the right in which it 
believes and the good upon which its heart is set. 

This goodness does not always call itself Christian, be it 
granted, or even know itself to be such. A chaplain in the English ■ 
army writes: "There is in the army a very large amount of truef 
religion. It is not, certainly, what people before the war were 
accustomed to call religion, but perhaps it may be nearer the real 
. thing. It is startling, no doubt, and humiliating to find out how 
very little hold traditional Christianity has upon men. ... So 
far as I am able to estimate, we are faced now with this situation, 
a Christian life combined with a pagan creed. For while men's i 
conduct and their outlook are to a large extent unconsciously! 
Christian, their creed (or what they think to be their creed) most 
emphatically is not. . . . Nevertheless I feel that out here one 
is very near to the spirit of Christ. There is a general wholesome- 
ness of outlook, a sense of justice, honor and sincerity, a readiness 
to take what comes and carry on, a power of endurance genuinelyl 
sublime, a light-heartedness and cheeriness (nearly always, I 
believe, put on for the sake of other people), a generosity and 
comradeship which are obviously Christ-like."^ 

There is strength and goodness at home, too. We had become 
accustomed in late years to hear it said that the churches were 
losing their hold upon the people of America. Whether or not that 
be true, the war has begun to reveal to America, as it has to our 
Allies, the depth and power of the real moral and spiritual life 
beneath the surface. Granted that we are witnessing no wide- 
spread evangelistic stirrings, no indications of a great revival. 
It seems probable, indeed, that the itinerant evangelists who had 

1 "The Church in the Furnace," pp. 53-54. 



EFFECT UPON RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 117 

lately become the fashion among us, have passed the heyday of 
their power. Neither are the "prophetic" folk who misunderstand 
their Bibles so persistently and look so confidently for the second 
coming of the Lord, winning an assent at all commensurate with 
their effort. But there is a vast amount of quiet, sensible, devoted 
Christian living in America. There is more of genuine religion 
among us than we had realized. That religion, for the most part 
inarticulate, and hardly knowing itself to be Christian, is finding 
expression in action. The spirit in which America entered the war ; 
the high moral aims which President Wilson, interpreter yet 
leader of his people, has set before the world; the quiet, matter-of- 
fact and matter-of-duty way in which the principle of selective 
service was accepted and carried out as democracy's method of 
mobilizing its power; the cooperation and the giving; the uncom- 
plaining solemn pride of homes that have already made the 
supreme sacrifice — these are but the first evidences in America 
of a moral virility, a real religion, which, we may confidently hope, 
will strengthen us, with our Allies, not only to carry on to 
victory, but to resist the victor's temptations. 

Will this deep, elemental, common religion of America come to 

understand itself, and to recognize its fundamentally Christian 

character.? The answer to that question lies Avith the churches. 

And there are clear indications that many of them, at least, will 

not fail to realize and meet their opportunity. 

j Not that we shall do without dogmas. Religion cannot maintain 

I itself as mere ethics. It is a way of living; but a way of living that 

j justifies itself by a way of believing about God and duty and 

j immortality. The point is, that in the natural order of growth 

i life has a certain priority to belief, action to full understanding. 

And that certainly is the order of growth involved in the present 

situation. 

I As the churches share in the expanding and deepening common 

life and bring their beliefs to bear upon it, in interpretation of 

its ultimate motives and hopes, there will be growth on both sides. 



118 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

Men elementally Christian in action will come to know what they 
believe; and on the other hand the churches themselves will dis- 
cern more clearly which of their customs and beliefs are relevant 
to the real issues of life and function in essential ways. Our creeds 
will become simpler, but more vital. And that will make possible 
a closer unity of the churches. One may well question both the 
possibility and the desirability of a complete obliteration of 
denominational lines. We may always have and need denomi- • 
national loyalty just as we shall always have and need patriotism. 
But denominational loyalties can be incorporated into a higher 
loyalty to the inclusive fellowship of Christ's Church as a whole, 
just as- national loyalties, we now see, can and must be incor- 
porated into a higher loyalty to humanity which will be given 
expression and body in a world-wide League of Nations. 

We may expect religious education after the war, again, to he 
more fully Christian in its conception of God as well as in its view 
of life. 

Jesus, so far as we know, never used the word "democracy." 
Yet just such a democratic world-community as we are now begin- 
ning in a practical way to understand and strive for, he taught 
and lived and died for. Christianity's ultimate ideal is no longer 
a mere ideal. It has become an actual political and social program I 
and possibility. 

"The brotherhood of mankind must no longer be a fair but 
empty phrase," wrote President Wilson to Russia ; "it must be 
given a structure of force and reality. The nations must realize 
their common life and effect a workable partnership to secure that 
life against the aggressions of autocratic and self-pleasing 
power." The world's choice is between "Utopia or hell," is Mr. 
Wells' striking phrase, which he expounds in a remarkable article 
in The New Republic on "The League of Nations." "Existing 
states," he says, "have become impossible as absolutely independ- 
ent sovereignties. The new conditions bring them so close together 
and give them such extravagant powers of mutual injury that 



EFFECT UPON RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 119 

they must either sink national pride and dynastic ambitions in 
subordination to the common welfare of mankind or else utterly 
shatter one another. It becomes more and more plainly a choice 
between the League of free nations and famished men looting in 
search of non-existent food amidst the burning ruins of our world. 
In the end I believe the common sense of mankind will prefer a 
revision of its ideas of nationality and imperialism to the latter 
alternative." 

Mr. Wells is right. The proposal to establish a league of nations 
presents itself in our day as a matter of plain common sense. Yet 
if there is one lesson written with perfect clearness on the pages 
of history, it is that common sense alone cannot save the world 
from the tragedies of error, self-will and sin, and that common 
sense motived by self-interest will in the end defeat itself. In his 
Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching, Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin 
has called our attention to the remarkable prophecy of the present 
world war made by Frederick W. Robertson in a sermon preached 
at Brighton on January 11, 1852, addressed to a generation that 
glorified commerce as the guarantor of world unity and soiight 
to establish morality upon a basis of enlightened self-interest. 
The passage cannot be quoted too often, nor too firmly impressed 
upon the minds of the present generation, for there were those 
among us who, even up until the invasion of Belgium, kept pro- 
testing that there could be no war in a world so bound together 
by economic and commercial ties, and there are those now who 
find in such interests the only durable basis for world reconstruc- 
tion. "Brethren," said Robertson, "that which is built on selfish- 
ness cannot stand. The system of personal interest must be 
shriveled to atoms. Therefore, we who have observed the ways of 
God in the past are waiting in quiet but awful expectation until 
He shall confound this system as He has confounded those which 
have gone before, and it may be effected by convulsions more ter- 
rible and bloody than the world has yet seen. While men are 
talking of peace and of the great progress of civilization, there 



120 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

is heard in the distance the noise of arms, gathering rank on rank, 
east and west, north and south, and there come rolHng toward 
us the crushing thunders of universal war. . . . There is but one 
other system to be tried, and that is the cross of Christ — the 
system that is not to be built upon selfishness nor upon blood, not 
upon personal interest, but upon love," 

If Wells has stated the world's alternative, Robertson has 
shown the way of final and permanent right decision. To common 
sense must be added love. The brotherhood of man must be estab- 
lished upon a common acknowledgment of the Fatherhood of God. 
The world community can ultimately be motived by nothing less 
than the life within the hearts of men of the God whom they come 
to know through Jesus Christ. 

This means both that the world must become more religious, 
and that religion must become more fully Christian. We can no 
longer believe in any God less great or less good than the God 
whom Jesus Christ reveals. However much it may be tempted 
to the lower view from time to time, we may reasonably expect 
that henceforth the world is done with belief in a mere tribal or 
national God. The supreme and inmost bond of the world com- 
munity can be nothing other and nothing less than the Father of 
our Lord Jesus Christ, who regards all men as his children and 
who steadfastly seeks, with them and through them, the good 
of all. 

Religious education after the war will be more democratic, 
more immediately concerned with life, more fully Christian. In 
so interpreting the present situation, we have had in mind espe- 
cially the more or less formal religious education in the church 
and the church school. The same tendencies will influence the more 
informal and indirect religious education of children in the family. 
We have reason, indeed, to hope for a strengthening of family ties 
and a renewal of family religion. The sacrifices of these days are 
rendering relationships very precious that in a more careless, un- 
thinking time we had accepted as a matter of course. And it is 



EFFECT UPON RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 121 

entirely possible that victory may wait until in America, as in 
England and France, there are few families that do not live in 
closer fellowship with the unseen world because their sons are 
there. The gradual disintegration of family life which the past half 
century has witnessed was but incidental to a rapid change in 
social, economic and industrial conditions. There is reason to 
expect that the family will so adjust its life to these conditions as 
to maintain its character as a social group, wherein genuine 
democracy and true religion may be propagated from generation 
to generation by that sharing of interests, occupations and affec- 
tions which is the most potent and vital of all educational methods. 
That it should so adjust itself and so fulfill its primary educa- 
tional function, should be a matter of the utmost concern to both 
Church and State, for it is hard to conceive how either the Chris- 
tian religion or a democratic society could maintain itself without 
the aid of the family. 



VII 

FOREIGN MISSIONS AND THE WAR, TODAY 
AND TOMORROW 

HARLAN P. BEACH 

It might seem to the uninformed reader that foreign missions and 
war have nothing in common; for "what communion hath light 
with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial?" 
Fuller knowledge of the varied work of missions and of its many 
helpful contributions to African, Asiatic and Oceanic peoples 
would remove this misapprehension. Professor Coolidge, of Har- 
vard, suggests some important points of contact between missions 
and the less developed races, particularly of the enterprise as 
carried on today in contrast with its earlier objectives/ How 
the races of mission fields that have been thus affected are con- 
tributing to the war at home and in the trenches. Dr. Arthur J. 
Brown has described most vividly in a paragraph upon the 
cosmopolitan composition of the allied forces at the front. ^ 
Missionary periodical files abound in references to the war's in- 
roads upon missionary enterprises, and to the important medi- 
ating work of missions. A great volume of testimony would show 
that while missionaries still regard the upbuilding of the mind 
and the saving of souls as fundamentally desirable, the enterprise 
affects every phase of the personal and community life of the 
peoples to which it ministers. 

Statistics of the missionary situation at the beginning of the 
war reveal the extent and scope of present-day foreign missions. 

1 A. C. Coolidge, "The United States as a World Power," p. 329. 

2 F. Lynch, "President Wilson and the Moral Aims of the War," New York, 
1918, pp. 50-51. 



FOREIGN MISSIONS AND THE WAR 123 

In the latest full collection of such statistics,^ one finds a series 
of tables devoted to "General and Evangelistic" data, to "Educa- 
tional" activities of missions, and to "Medical and Philanthropic" 
enterprises conducted by missionaries. It is impracticable to 
present the totals of the seventy-two columns, suggestive of the 
many subordinate activities of missions ; a few items will indicate 
the more important contacts established between the Protestant 
churches of Christendom and the fifty fields which their missions 
have touched in many helpful ways. In these mission countries 351 
Protestant societies had as their foreign staff 24,039 missionaries, 
including 13,719 women workers and wives. Stationed at 4,094 
towns and villages, they directed the activities of a native staff 
of 109,099 and of 26,210 churches, the communicant membership 
of which was 2,408,900, with 1,423,314 others under religious 
instruction. In their elementary schools were 1,699,775 pupils, 
while in secondary schools were 218,207, and in the colleges and 
universities 15,636 students were enrolled. In theological and 
Bible training institutions 10,588 were preparing for the Chris- 
tian leadership of the churches. Their industrial schools had an 
enrolment of 10,125, and their normal students numbered 7,504. 
Mission hospitals and dispensaries were presided over by 1,589 
physicians and trained nurses, aided by a native staff of 2,336. 
In the year reported, 3,107,755 individuals were treated, in single 
visits or during prolonged residence in hospitals. Orphanages 
numbered 245, with 9,736 inmates, and 39 leper homes sheltered 
1,880 unfortunate outcasts. Such an exhibit, incomplete as it is, 
will indicate the manifold tendrils which have bound Christian 
missionaries to the hearts of the nations ; and if Roman Catholic 
statistics for this date were available,* the importance of missions 
as a steadying and reconstructive force at present and in post- 
bellum readjustments would be even more manifest. 

3 Beach and St. John, "World Statistics of Christian Missions," 1916, pp. 
59-61. 

4 For the year 1913, see P. K. Streit, "Atlas Hierarchicus," summarized in 
"World Statistics of Christian Missions," pp. 103-104. 



124 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

In discussing the war as affecting missions, only a few out- 
standing facts can be mentioned. Practically all of the mission 
world has taken sides in the tremendous conflict, most of these 
nations declaring for the Allies. Many of them have generously 
contributed the means and man force to hasten the day of peace. 
In 1917 nearly half a million from India were enlisted, of whom 
285,200 were combatants and the rest were employed behind the 
lines in multifarious tasks. As a result of the recent conference 
at Delhi, it is hoped that another half million may be secured this 
year,^ thus giving that Empire the numerical precedence among 
Britain's dominions. From North China alone some 135,000 
laborers are serving the British forces in varied ways. "They 
come, also, from Morocco, Algeria, Tunis and the jungles of 
Senegal ; from Madagascar and Tahiti, and several hundred thou- 
sand from French Indo-China and China proper. Black, yellow 
and white, East and West, educated and ignorant, progressive 
and backward, are laboring side by side."^ So important is it that 
these polyglot assistants and warriors should be cared for in a 
Christian way that many missionaries have been called away from 
their distant fields to a manifold ministry to their adopted 
countrymen behind the trenches. Many of these recruits are 
Christian volunteers, especially so in the Indian contingent. 

The effects of this European Armageddon upon the mission 
fields themselves has been less harmful than had been expected 
and more advantageous than was anticipated. German missions 
have been affected most among the Protestants, and among Roman 
Catholics France has been the chief sufferer. In the latter country 
there is no exemption for either Protestant or Catholic ministers 
of military age. Missions-Direktor Axenfeld of Berlin, in a recent 
publication,^ states that German Protestant work in Africa has 

, 5 London Times, May 16, 1918. 

6 Personal letter from an investigator in France, May 29, 1918. 

7 "Das Kriegserlebnis der deutschen Mission in I^ichte der Heiligen Schrift" 
as quoted in The Missionary Review of the World for June, 1918, pp. 433-424. 



FOREIGN MISSIONS AND THE WAR 125 

been practically disrupted, in India crippled by enforced with- 
drawals, in smaller British colonies similarly weakened by the 
expulsions, and permitted to go on with restrictions in other parts 
of Asia and North America. According to later information, about 
400 German Protestant missionaries and missionary candidates 
are in military service, 68 are in hospitals, 120 are prisoners of 
war in various countries, and about 1,000 missionaries are still 
working in various fields. Referring to the Zeitschrift filr Mis- 
sionswissenschaft, in the files for 1915 and 1916, one learns that 
3,000 Catholic missionaries are estimated to have been called to 
the colors, and that in 1916 there were 2,336 serving in the army. 
French Protestant missions, with a much smaller force abroad, 
have suffered in similar proportion ; so that in French and German 
mission fields the personnel has been greatly reduced, limited, or 
has been obliterated entirely. British missions have likewise sent 
to the colors many of their best men from the field and the candi- 
date list, while a number have been transferred from field service 
to work among their constituency in Mesopotamian and French 
camps. Relatively few native Christian leaders have enlisted. 

The Christian communities in mission lands have suffered in 
various ways through the war. The removal of supervising mis- 
sionaries in part — almost wholly in the case of German socie- 
ties — has left many flocks without their chief shepherds. Great 
as has been this loss, it has wrought a greater benefit in churches 
whose native leaders thus have been brought to the front and 
have proved to their congregations that the church was so far 
indigenous as to survive the withdrawal of missionaries. To help 
their pastors, the people have undertaken responsibilities which 
without this necessity would not have been borne, thus developing 
unsuspected gifts and engendering hope for the future. During 
the war, evangelistic campaigns, largely participated in by the 
native church, have been carried on in a number of countries and 
with marked success. 

Participation in the great conflict by the Christians and non- 



126 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

Christians of mission lands has had mixed results. On the one 
hand, any delusion as to the civilization and attitudes of so-called 
Christian countries has been dissipated by the undreamed of 
savagery and international hatred which they have seen. This has 
led to opposition to missionaries on the fields, especially in Persia 
and in Morocco, where a Moslem said to Dr. Kerr: "Why don't 
you turn your attention to Christians.? With all our faults, we 
have some religion left, but the Christians have none." On the 
other hand, it has revealed to the peoples so aiding their Euro- 
pean rulers their real values to them. This has given to Indians 
especially a renewed determination to secure from England quid 
pro quo in the form of greater political liberty and social privi- 
leges. While this has been especially emphasized by Moslems and 
Indians, it has affected the Christians with so great a spirit of 
nationalism that the recent All-India Christian Council sent a 
deputation to the Viceroy requesting the Government to recognize 
the 3,876,203 Christians of the 1911 census as a community de- 
serving political representation in the Imperial Legislative 
Council. The increasing demand of all Indians for greater freedom 
led Parliament to send out a Commission to investigate the situa- 
tion; and while their report at time of writing has not been pub- 
lished in full, the people of that Empire are assured of many 
alleviations of existing disabilities. The independent Powers of 
the Far East also will be benefited in many ways through their 
cooperation in the war. A greatly feared backset to the cause of 
missions in China, through the exposure to fierce temptations and 
from the harsh treatment unavoidable in war of its labor contin- 
gent in France, has been met in part by sending to those camps 
many successful missionaries from North China, as well as a dele- 
gation of Christian Chinese studying in American institutions. 
In Mesopotamia, also, similar work undertaken by Indian mis- 
sionaries will do much to lessen the ill effects of the war. 

Another resultant of the unprecedented conflict comes from 
the ethical and religious reactions occasioned by seas of Christian 



FOREIGN MISSIONS AND THE WAR 127 

blood. An old convert in India pathetically asked his pastor if 
the great fire in the West were still burning, and a South Sea 
islander stood bewildered and shaken when he learned that the 
war was primarily between Christian nations. Keen Japanese were 
at first ready to declare Christianity a failure because of this 
stupendous crime of Christendom ; but their maturer thought and 
the increasing barbarity in German initiative has convinced them 
that instead of its proving the bankruptcy of Christianity, to 
quote Secretary Oldham, "the War has shown the bankruptcy of 
a society which has refused to accept and apply the principles 
of Christianity in social, national and international affairs. As 
has been well said, 'Christianity has not been tried and found 
wanting ; it has been found difficult and never tried.' "® So con- 
trary is it to Christian teachings that for a time the churches 
in one district in China set apart a day each week for special 
prayer that this demoniacal evil might be divinely conquered. 

But it is more than a problem of Christianity. The Moslem 
world has been fighting against itself. The Jihad, declared by 
the Sheikh-ul-Islam and the Sultan of Turkey most solemnly in 
November, 1915, failed to call to arms a body of fifty millions 
of fanatical Mohammedans, as had been fervently hoped would 
be the case. "There was no shock, since there was no sympathetic 
response. Protests were made by the Moslems of Turkey, while 
the eighty millions under British control proclaimed their un- 
shaken loyalty; and from Persia, Morocco, Egypt, India, Russia, 
Algeria and other Moslem countries, Turkey was taken severely 
to task for forming an alliance with two Christian Powers in a 
conflict with other Christian nations. . . . Mohammedans are in 
despair especially since, as a last fatal blow, the Arabs have 
arisen in open rebellion against Turkey, seizing the sacred places 
of Islam, and repudiating the right to the office of caliph or of 
the sultan of Turkey."^ Similarly an Arabic periodical published 

8 J. H. Oldham, "The World and the Gospel," p. 300. 

9 J. L. Barton in Missionary Ammunition, Number One, 1916, p. 19. 



128 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

in Zanzibar says : "The pillars of the East are tottering, its 
thrones are being destroyed, its power is being shattered and its 
supremacy is being obliterated. The Moslem world is divided 
against itself.'"° 

But what have been the effects of this war upon the home base 
of missions? The financial drafts made by the governments and 
voluntary organizations of warring nations upon their peoples 
and the increased cost of everything have affected the treasuries 
of some of the smaller societies unfavorably. For the most part, 
however, the mission boards have not only met their expenses but 
in many cases receipts have been larger than ever before. The 
contributions thus given have called attention to missions as 
being both worthy and indispensable elements in the world situa- 
tion, and hence necessitating their support. Perhaps this is felt 
most generally among friends of British missions. 

Man power causes the societies greater difficulty. Practically 
the entire German force has been sent from India, or else interned, 
and to fill their places has made new demands upon other nation- 
alities. The depleted ranks of French societies have not been filled. 
Great Britain needs all her men for the trenches and has been 
sorely pressed in trying to supply the foreign fields with the 
workers absolutely required. Even the United States, since her 
entry into the war, is experiencing difficulty in keeping missionary 
candidates from going to the front in Europe instead of re- 
enforcing the thin Asiatic and African battle lines. Hope for 
improvement in this recruiting is slight, since the call to arms has 
laid strongest hold upon college and university men. Thus in 1915, 
out of 52,000 students in German universities, 41,000 were under 
arms ; in France all students except those physically unfit were 
called out ; in Great Britain and Ireland about 50 per cent of the 
male students were in the army or navy, in Canada 40 per cent, 
and in Australia 30 per cent.^^ In the United States volunteering 

10 Missionary Review of the World, January, 1917, p. 4. 

11 International Review of Missions, April, 1916, p. 183. 



FOREIGN MISSIONS AND THE WAR 129 

and the draft have emptied the colleges and universities of prac- 
tically all the choicest men of twenty-one and upward. If this 
continues long, an interim must ensue before another college 
generation furnishes a sufficient number of missionary candidates. 
Yet it may be expected that the present devotion to a cause that 
ends so commonly in death or lifelong crippling will end forever 
the old excuse urged against missionary enlistment, that the ser- 
vice is a hard one and often fatal, in certain unheathful countries. 
Men will join the colors of the Prince of Peace and of Life even 
more willingly than they now march under the banners of destruc- 
tion and death in the hope of establishing once more justice, 
righteousness and lasting freedom in the earth. 

A happy eifect of the present stress is found in the growing 
rapprochement between the missions of a given national group, 
and to a less extent between those of different nations. This is 
due to the necessity for cooperation in order to make a reduced 
force serve for the needs of an increasing work. In a few cases 
already a desire to economize resources has led to readjustment 
of fields ; in others to a temporary filling of vacant places by 
missionaries of a different denomination or nationality. The home 
constituencies are thus being taught the beautiful lesson of the 
trenches as related to true brotherhood and essential Christianity. 
Perhaps one of the best discussions of this war as affecting the 
international and interconfessional relationships of missions is 
that of Dr. J. Schmidlin, a Roman Catholic professor of theology 
in the University of Miinster, found in The Constructive Quarterly 
for December, 1915, from which we quote two sentences: "Thus 
that which has served to separate missionaries who were comrades 
in belief and confession — national solidarity and love of country- 
has also united and reconciled children of the same country who 
were separated in their belief. Surmounting all barriers of dogma 
and church polity, men have learned to love and cherish one 
another, yes, even to recognize that in spite of all that separates 
us there is much also that binds us together." 



130 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

Turning now from the effect of the war upon missions, a few 
paragraphs may be devoted to considering post-b,ellum recon- 
struction in mission lands. The Germans, even more than the 
Allies, are diligently studying the many problems and possibilities 
of changes necessitated by the readjustments that must surely 
come. The economic waste of the past four years is almost incon- 
ceivably great ; and to restore this waste puts upon every nation 
an amount of production vastly greater than any known in the 
past. Raw material, freedom of the seas that the manufacturing 
countries may buy from every land and carry back for sale and 
distribution the manufactured products, a new enlistment of labor 
in countries where climate and primitive living make work irk- 
some and unnecessary, an uplift in desires and ideals that new 
markets may be created, increasing intelligence and friendliness 
so that cooperation may be willing and profitable — these are some 
of the essentials of progress after the war. 

In earlier cognate discussions, men like Captain Mahan have 
emphasized the importance of eastward and westward movements 
in the temperate zone, while others of Benjamin Kidd's school 
have insisted no less strongly upon the importance of the Tropics 
and the consequent north and south line of industrial life. A score 
of years ago nearly. Professor Reinsch, in his "World Politics," 
startled many American readers by his insistence upon the 
importance of the undeveloped and unoccupied tropical regions 
of the globe, mainly in South America and Africa. Even more t 
insistently Kidd's "Control of the Tropics" had, two years before, 
magnified the same zone, but more particularly the densely peopled , 
tracts with their varied possibilities of production and exploita-f 
tion. In a recent article by J. A, R. Marriott, M.P., entitled 
"Welt-Politik," General Smuts of Africa is thus quoted: "For- 
merly we did not fully appreciate the Tropics as in the economy 
of civilization. It is only quite recently that people have come to 
realize that without an abundance of raw material which the 
Tropics alone can supply, the highly developed industries of 



FOREIGN MISSIONS AND THE WAR 131 

today would be impossible. Vegetable and mineral oils, cotton, 
sisal, rubber, jute and similar products in vast quantities are 
essential for the industrial world. "^^ 

Another aspect of tropical Africa is brought out in an article 
by Herr Emil Zimmerman, writing in the Europdische Staats und 
Wirtschaft Zeitung of June 23, 1917: "tf the Great War makes 
Central Africa German, fifty years hence 500,000 and more 
Germans can be living there by the side of 50,000,000 blacks. 
Then there may be an army of 1,000,000 men in German Africa, 
and the colony will have its own war navy, like Brazil. An England 
that is strong in Africa dominates the situation in Southern 
Europe and does not heed us. But from Central Africa we shall 
dominate the English connections with South Africa, India and 
Australia, and we shall force English policy to reckon with us."^^ 
And again Dr. Solf, the German Secretary for Colonies, has 
lately proposed a simple solution of Africa's industrial future. 
"In redividing Africa those nations which have proved most 
humane toward the natives must be favored. Germany has always 
considered that to colonize meant doing mission work. That is 
why in the present War the natives of our colonies stick to us. 
England's colonial history, on the other hand, is nothing but a 
list of dark crimes."^* The principle enunciated in the first sen- 
tence of this statement is as important and true as the later ones 
are incorrect, if the present writer's inquiries and observations 
in British and German East Africa in 1912 are indicative of the 
facts in the case. 

The political problems of the countries here considered are 
quite as important and perplexing as is their economic status. 
Three theories of control have been tried: (1) That of plantations 
or possessions, worked for the possessor's profit with little regard 
for the governed; (2) the policy of vigorous expansion by the 

12 Nineteenth Century and After, April, 1918, pp. 675-676. 

13 Reported in the London Times, November 9, 1917. 

14 Nineteenth Century and After, April, 1918, p. 681. 



132 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

whites themselves, despite the perils of tropical environments ; 
and (3) permitting the natives to work out their own develop- 
ment independently, with or without white oversight. Of these 
the third is the only one favored by the ethics and political 
sagacity of enlightened, nations today. But this demands the 
consent and good will 0£ the governed, and how may these essen- 
tials be secured.'' 

India is the most important, politically considered, of all 
tropical lands. And that Empire's relation to England the eminent 
Indian ruler. Sir Herbert Edwardes, declared in an address de- 
livered at Liverpool in 1860, should be that of a stewardship in 
Christian hands, a designation echoed in Kidd's general phrase, 
"a trust of civilization," and John H. Harris's "trusteeship vs. 
possession." How shall this trust be fulfilled .^ Certainly one must 
consider the question of India's poet laureate. Sir Rabindranath 
Tagore, "Is the instinct of the West right where she builds her 
national welfare behind the barricade of a universal distrust of 
humanity .?"^^ Such distrust is not removed by the Indian educa- 
tional scheme alone, or with the addition of civilization. "If we 
pursue the ignis fatuus of secular education in a pagan land, 
destitute of other light," quoting Sir Herbert again, "then we 
English will lose India without those Indians gaining any 
future."^® In a similar vein Sir Alfred Lyall testified: "The 
wildest, as well as the shallowest notion of all, seems to me that 
universally prevalent belief that education, civilization and in- 
creased material prosperity will reconcile the people of India 
eventually to our rule."^^ 

A partial solution of India's political problems is found in the 
deputation to that Empire in accordance with Mr. Montagu's 
speech in the House of Commons of August 30, 1917, in the course 
of which he said: "The policy of His Majesty's Government, with 

15 R. Tagore, "Nationalism," p. 101. 

16 Quoted in W. Archer's "India and Its Future," pp. 307-308. 

17 M. Durand, "Life of Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall," p. 89. 



FOREIGN MISSIONS AND THE WAR 133 

which the Government of India is in complete accord, is that of 
the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the 
administration, and the gradual development of self-governing 
institutions, with a view to the progressive realization of respon- 
sible government in India as an integral part of the Indian 
Empire."^^ The favorable outcome of the deputation's visit has 
been mentioned already. 

Religious problems and readjustments will also be part of the 
aftermath of the war. At least six millions of Jews, who rightly 
or wrongly are the objects of the Christian missionary propa- 
ganda, have been released from disabilities in Europe, and new 
careers and educational opportunities will lie before that remark- 
able race. "Jewish influence in the life of the world, already great 
in proportion to the size of the community, will gain a fresh 
accession of strength. Religiously the emancipation may be 
expected to result, as it has done in other countries, in a decay 
of Jewish orthodoxy, of which the Jews of the Ghetto have been 
the main support. While the weakening of the forces of conserva- 
tism will open new doors of opportunity to the Christian Church, 
there is on the other hand the grave danger that many Jews may 
drift into irreligion and cast the weight of their natural ability 
and energy on the side of materialism."^^ Mr. Balfour's letter to 
Lord Rothschild of November 2, 1917, stated that the British 
Government viewed with favor the establishment in Palestine of 
a national home for the Jewish people. In the case of missions to 
Moslem lands, if the Allies are victorious, the work in Turkey will 
be greatly simplified. Whether this will be the case in Africa 
depends upon whether the dominant Powers permit missionary 
organizations to act with greater freedom than they have been 
granted in the past in North Africa and in certain British pos- 
sessions. In any case Islam will present strong claims and serious 
problems for consideration by missionary organizations. 

18 International Review of Missions, January, 1918, p. 23. 

19 Ibid., p. 53. 



134 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

Is the foreign missionary enterprise willing and competent to 
aid in the reconstruction soon to come in mission lands? Here are 
a few typical and representative replies to this important question. 

Representing in a semi-official way the missionary societies of 
the United States and Canada, Dr. Robert E. Speer writes thus : 
"Foreign Missions are the direct antithesis of the world condi- 
tions which men most deplore and the purest expression o^f the 
principles which underlie the world order for which men are long- 
ing. Foreign Missions represent international friendship and good 
will. The missionary goes out to help and serve. He bridges the 
gulf between his own nation and the nation to which he goes. 
He is not seeking to exploit, or to take advantage, or to make 
gain. He is seeking only to befriend and aid. And his aim and 
spirit are internationally unifying. The missionaries succeed in 
surmounting all the hindrances of nationality and language in 
binding different peoples together in good will. Furthermore, they 
are demonstrating the possibility of the existence of a strong 
nationalistic spirit side by side with human brotherhood and 
international unity. They are seeking to develop in each nation 
a national church embodying and inspiring and consecrating to 
God the genius and destiny of each nation. But they are doing 
this because these are the elements of a yet larger unity, the 
unity of mankind. The first is not contradictory to the second; 
it is essential to it, as the perfection of the State requires the 
perfection of the family unit, and the family demands and does 
not exclude the richest individualism. It is out of her perfect 
ministry to the life of each nation that the Church is to be pre- 
pared to minister to the life of all humanity and to achieve its 
unity."'° 

As editor of The International Review of Missions and secre- 
tary of the Edinburgh Continuation Committee, Mr. J. H. Old- 
ham states his views of the wo rid- functions of missions : "Missions 
are the antithesis of war. They have created between different 

20 Missionary Ammunition, Num,ber One, 1916, pp. 12-13. 



FOREIGN MISSIONS AND THE WAR 135 

peoples relations, not of competition, but of cooperation. With 
all their shortcomings they are an embodiment of the idea that 
the stronger and more advanced nations exist to uplift the weaker 
and more backward. They are a vital expression of the principle 
on which the new society must rest. . . . The gospel of love must 
embody itself in act no less manifestly than selfishness and 
brutality have expressed themselves in the terrible scenes that 
the world has witnessed. The non-Christian races fear, not without 
cause, that the object of western peoples is to exploit them. Mis- 
sions must convince them that the Church exists to help and serve 
them, and the desire to serve them must be made evident in ways 
that they can understand. The task of Missions thus grows 
broader and larger than we at first conceived. "^^ 

And such statements are not the claims of interested propa- 
gandists merely, — officials employed by missionary organizations, 
and hence liable to overrate the character and importance of 
missions to the nations. Few men have traversed the world as 
extensively and observantly as Sir Harry Johnston, and probably 
no one equals him in his varied administrative and anthropological 
services to Africa. In his Introduction to the Cambridge Univer- 
sity Maitland Prize Essay for 1915, he says: "Although the 
writer ... is so heterodox a professor of Christianity, practical 
experience in Africa, Asia and America has brought home to him 
ever and again during the last thirty-four years the splendid 
work which has been and is being accomplished by all types of 
Christian missionary amongst the Black, Brown and Yellow 
peoples of non-Caucasian race, and amid those Mediterranean or 
Asiatic Caucasians whose skins may be a little duskier than ours, 
but whose far-back ancestry was the same, whose minds and 
bodies are of our type, but whose mentality has been dwarfed and 
diverted from the amazing development of the European by false 
faiths, — false in their interpretation of Cosmos, false to the best 
human ideals in daily life." 

21 International Review of Missions, October, 1914, pp. 632-633. 



136 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

On a later page he upholds with the author "the work of 
Christian missionaries in general and lays down the rule that our 
relations with the backward peoples of the world should be carried 
on consonantly with the principles of Christian ethics — pity, 
patience, fair-mindedness, protection and instruction; with a view 
not to making them the carefully guarded serfs of the White 
race, but to enable them some day to be entirely self-dependent, 
and yet interdependent with us on universal human cooperation 
in world management." 

And once more this British administrator asserts: "The value 
of the Christian missionary is that he serves no government. He 
is not the agent of any selfish State, or self-seeking community. 
He does not even follow very closely the narrow-minded limitations 
of the Church or the sect that has sent him on his mission. He is 
the servant of an Ideal, which he identifies with God; and this 
ideal is in its essence not distinguishable from essential Chris- 
tianity ; which is at one and the same time essential common sense, 
real liberty, a real seeking after progress and bettermerit. He 
preaches chastity and temperance, the obeying of such laws as 
are made by the community ; but consonantly with all constitu- 
tional and peaceful efforts, he urges the bringing of man-made 
laws more and more into conformity with Christian principles."'^ 

As representing nations of ancient culture coming under the 
helpful influences of Christian missions, perhaps no one will 
command a more attentive hearing than Marquis Okuma, ex- 
premier of Japan and one of the world's foremost statesmen. 
From a summary of his address, delivered at the semi-centennial 
of Protestant missions in that Empire, we excerpt the following: 
"The coming of missionaries to Japan was the means of linking 
this country to the Anglo-Saxon spirit to which the heart of 
Japan has always responded. The success of Christian work in 
Japan can be measured by the extent to which it has been able 

22 A. J. Macdonald, "Trade, Politics and Christianity in Africa and the 
East," xii, xv, xviii. 



FOREIGN MISSIONS AND THE WAR 137 

to infuse the Anglo-Saxon and the Christian spirit into the 
nation. It has been a means of putting into these fifty years an 
advance equivalent to that of a hundred years. Japan has a his- 
tory of 2,500 years, and 1,500 years ago had advanced in 
civilization and domestic arts, but never took wide views, nor 
entered upon wide work. Only by the coming of the West in its 
missionary representatives, and by the spread of the Gospel, did 
the nation enter upon world-wide thoughts and world-wide work. 
This is a great result of the Christian spirit. To be sure Japan 
had her religions, and Buddhism prospered greatly; but this 
prosperity was largely through political means. Now this creed 
[Buddhism] has been practically rejected by the better classes 
who, being spiritually thirsty, have nothing to drink. "^^ 

These representative testimonies suggest both the fitness and 
the willingness of Christian missions to participate in the coming 
international readjustments necessitated by the war. Such an 
enterprise supplies what the war-weary world so greatly needs — 
the elan vital et creatur, to borrow Bergson's fine phrase. And the 
missionary leaders are alert and at their task. On April 4, 1918, 
Drs. John R. Mott and Charles R. Watson, representing the 
missionary boards of the United States and Canada, met with 
the Standing Committee of Missionary Societies in Great Britain 
and Ireland, when it was resolved to form an international 
"Emergency Committee of Cooperating Missions." Already the 
British committee had been consulted by the Government concern- 
ing certain important matters affecting the mission fields and 
their problems arising from the war. Such questions are becoming 
increasingly numerous, and their solution demands an intimate 
knowledge of missions and of the spirit and aspirations of African 
and Asiatic races. America is likewise needing such a body of 
experts to supplement government investigations. This country 
has a slight preponderance in representation on the Emergency 
Committee ; and in the chairman. Dr. John R. Mott, the foremost 

23 Japan Daily Mail, October 9, 1909. 



138 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

Protestant leader of the world, and a man of such diplomatic gifts 
that President Wilson twice vainly called him to the position of 
minister to China, — though he accepted appointment upon com- 
missions to deal with Mexico and Russia later, — the committee 
has a missionary statesman who is equal to the important trusts 
that will be committed to its consideration. To serve as the eyes, 
ears and hands of this important post-bellum council, the two 
largest fields, India and China, have each an energetic Continua- 
tion Committee of the Edinburgh Conference of 1910, established 
as the result of Dr. Mott's visits and conferences in 1912-1913. 
The Foreign Missions Conference of North America, and espe- 
cially its Board of Reference and Counsel, are in annual and ad 
interim consultation as questions arise from time to time. 

President King quotes these words from Lloyd George's ad- 
dress to a labor delegation : "Don't always be thinking of getting 
back where we were before the War. Get a really new world. I 
firmly believe that what is known as the after-the-War settlement 
will direct the destinies of all classes for generations to come. I 
believe the settlement after the War will succeed in proportion 
to its audacity. The readier we are to cut away from the past, 
the better we are likely to succeed. Think out new ways, new 
methods, of dealing with old problems."^* 

Another horizon of the same idealistic character opens before 
the eyes of our own President, the seer to the nations in this 
epoch-making time. In an address delivered on October 5, 1916, 
President Wilson proclaims the new day to the United States : 
"America up to the present time has been, as if by deliberate 
choice, confined and provincial, and it will be impossible for her 
to remain confined and provincial. Henceforth she belongs to 
the world and must act as part of the world, and all the attitudes .| 
of America will henceforth be altered." And again three weeks 
later he adds : "America was established in order to indicate, at 
any rate in one government, the fundamental rights of man. 

24 F. Lynch, "President Wilson and the Moral Aims of the War," p. 73. 



FOREIGN MISSIONS AND THE WAR 139 

America must hereafter be ready as a member of the family of 
nations to exert her whole force, moral and physical, to the 
assertion of those rights throughout the round world." Here is 
a sentence from his greetings to France on Bastille Day, 1918: 
"The War is being fought to save ourselves from intolerable 
things ; but it is also being fought to save mankind." And as a 
final word from President Wilson, taken from his discussion of 
the new international morality: "My urgent advice to you would 
be, not always to think first of America, but always, also, to think 
first of humanity. You do not love humanity, if you seek to divide 
humanity into jealous camps. Humanity can be welded together 
only by love, by sympathy, by justice, not by jealousy and 
hatred." While none of these utterances refer specifically to mis- 
sions, yet surely Dr. W. I. Hull is correct in interpreting 
President Wilson's relation to races of the mission fields in these 
words : "Instead of exploiting backward peoples, he would apply 
the maxim of noblesse oblige, and would summon all nations to 
mutual aid in their ascent of 'the world's great altar stairs' up 
to the law and order, peace and justice, which constitute the true 
sunshine of God."^^ 

The "really new world" of Britain's Premier will not be domi- 
nated by Machiavelli, the motto of whose sixteenth and seven- 
teenth century monarchs was "L'etat c'est moi!" even though 
Treitschke ranked him second only to Aristotle as a political 
philosopher.^*' The present cataclysm of woes does not prove 
Professor Cramb's contention that "Corsica has conquered Gal- 
ilee" ; nor has Nietzsche thrust the "pale Galilean" from his 
throne. That semi-insane philosopher's Uebermenschen must fall 
before Sir John Macdonnell's "Super-Nationalism" as set forth 
in the March, 1918, issue of the Contemporary/ Review. And the 
President's world-echoed phrase, "world-democracy," is uttered 
only with the corrective in mind that was sounded forth a score 

25 F. Lynch, "President Wilson and the Moral Aitas of the War," p. 64. 

26 H. von Treitschke, "Politik," p. 3. 



140 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

of years ago by England's Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamber- 
lain, "Think imperially." It is only by the establishment of an 
Imperium in imperio through obedience to what the Duke of 
Wellington called the Christian's Marching Orders, the Great 
Commission, that the new rei^ of the Prince of Peace can become 
possible. If the blood-soaked "savagery of civilization on the 
march to save the world from the civilization of savagery" is 
the dolorous duty of the present hour, there is solace in the 
thought that Golgotha was but the prelude to the Resurrection 
and Ascension. The Ascent of Mankind in all its nations and 
peoples and kindreds and tongues is at hand. To hasten this uni- 
versal uplift and aid the World Powers as they seek to inaugurate 
the New Order, no agency is likely to aid more than foreign mis- 
sions among the peoples reached by that enterprise. And the new 
Imperial Thinking and Acts are simply those of the seven-fold 
Commission of the Saviour of the -World, "Behold, pray, go, heal, 
preach, teach, baptize, all nations," the conquering Labarum of 
an onward-moving Church. , 



VIII 
THE WAR AND SOCIAL WORK 

WILLIAM BACON BAILEY 

Although the duration of this world-war, and the part which 
we may be called upon to play in it, makes the destruction in 
wealth and human life in this country uncertain, and although 
we cannot tell so far in advance what will be the probable extent 
of social reconstruction to follow, still the war has progressed 
far enough, and its effects upon this country are sufficiently 
apparent, to enable us to forecast more or less indefinitely certain 
changes which are likely to follow its close. 

With regard to the future of social service, three facts are 
apparent : 

First, the people of our country are contributing money as 
never before to social work. We have for a long time realized 
that there was a reservoir in this country upon which we had 
drawn but little, but few realized the extent of this surplus. At 
times of great distress both here and abroad, our sympathy had 
been expressed by generous contributions. We had annually con- 
tributed large sums for the support of various philanthropies in 
this country, but as a nation we never realized how much we could 
give until the test came. One drive is hardly completed before 
another comes. We are surprised as a nation and as individuals 
at the amounts we can repeatedly give and still continue to meet 
our ordinary expenditures. This giving is getting to be almost a 
habit with us and when the war is over, although we may be help- 
ing to carry a huge national debt, I believe that our deserving 
charities will be supported more adequately than before the war. 



142 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

Second, we are getting more trained volunteer workers. One of 
the principal problems of charitable organizations engaged in case 
work has been to secure a sufficient number of capable volunteers 
who would keep their interest in the work and be regular in their 
attendance. The past few months have seen an increase in this' 
volunteer service which a year ago we should never have deemed 
possible. The Home Service Section of the American Red Cross 
has enlisted the service as visitors of thousands of our men and 
women who are anxious to do what they can to preserve the homes 
from which some member has been called to the colors. In a large 
number of cities this service has been placed under the supervision 
of paid workers who had been connected with charity organization 
societies and who brought with them the experience of years in 
directing and training volunteer friendly visitors. They recog- 
nized the advantage of classroom instruction for these visitors, 
even if necessity compelled that it be extremely limited. Accord- 
ingly training schools for these volunteers have been started in 
many places in this country and the attendance has been surpris- 
ingly large and regular. These volunteers are no longer timidly 
inquiring whether there is some opportunity for friendl}'" visiting 
in the homes ; they are demanding that some opportunity be given 
them. After the war this vast army of workers with limited train- 
ing will demand work of a similar nature and the problem of 
finding satisfactory volunteers should be solved for many years 
to come. 

Third, the war is raising the standard of care in charitable 
work. Most of these volunteers are visiting in soldiers' families. 
The allowance from the Government, the State and the Red Cross 
makes possible a good standard of living. While our soldiers are 
at the front they do not need to fear that the standard to which 
the family had been accustomed will be allowed to fall. At the 
close of hostilities these volunteers, accustomed to this standard, 
will demand that the same standard apply to the out-door relief 
given by charitable societies. The result will be a considerable 



THE WAR AND SOCIAL WORK 143 

rise in the standard of care. Professional social workers are not 
talking so much as they did about "cases." They are talking more 
about "families." This is the express desire of those who are 
directing the Home Service Section of the Red Cross. It is felt 
that in this way a more personal note may be brought into family 
rehabilitation in the future. It would appear, therefore, that the 
future should find our charities more adequately financed, better 
supplied with trained volunteers, and inspired to a higher standard 
of work. 

The habit of saving is likely to become much more firmly estab- 
lished among our people. We may never be so thrifty as the 
French nation, but we are progressing in that direction. Sub- 
scriptions to the Third Liberty Loan were received from seventeen 
millions of our people. In many of our public schools the purchase 
of thrift stamps by the scholars has been almost universal. It is 
probable that a very large proportion of those who are now pur- 
chasing liberty bonds never owned a bond of any description 
before. The habit formed in this way will continue in many cases. 
A banker a short time ago prophesied that upon the conclusion 
of this war the savings banks would receive far larger deposits 
than had ever been the case before. This habit of saving and the 
ownership of bonds will not fail to have its influence upon the 
rank and file of our people. At the close of the war we shall have 
our troubles with those who will advance repudiation or some 
scheme by which the burden of our national debt may be shifted 
and the necessity for saving miraculously avoided in some way. 
But the common sense of our people will assert itself and we shall 
realize that the only way by which we can replace this capital 
is by spending less than we earn. The plain word "thrift" seems 
likely to come into its own again. 

Up to the present time social work has appeared to many per- 
sons to be a fad. Some have felt that people with too little to do 
have spent their time in interfering with the affairs of people who 
had too much to do. The charge has been made that social service 



144 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

was only a temporary phenomenon which would soon disappear. 
But the war has taught us a lesson. The military authorities were 
among the first to recognize the need of proper recreation for the 
troops, and the demand for workers in the cantonments and at 
the front has been too great to be met. We see now that the need 
for recreation is a real need. It seems likely that commercialized 
recreation and amusement is likely to play a smaller part here- 
after, and that the community is going to demand a share in this 
enterprise in the future. Assembly halls, playgrounds, and similar 
provisions for the public will be required. 

We have never had a caste system in this country and aris- 
tocracy based upon birth has been unknown. It is probable that 
nowhere in the world during the past two centuries has it been 
easier for a man to improve his financial and social standing by 
his own efforts than in this country. Land ownership has been 
widely distributed, we have had a large middle class and men have 
been constantly changing from the group of employees to that of 
employers. But notwithstanding these factors, there has been a 
growth of class feeling in this country. Employers have been mis- 
trusted by employees. The growth of large fortunes has given 
rise to envy and bitterness in many quarters. Many have felt that 
ignorance was the principal cause for this growing antipathy. 
Employer and employee no longer met upon a common footing. 
Many attempts have been made to bridge this chasm. Settlement 
houses have been erected in order that individuals who would not 
be likely to meet in the usual course of business or social inter- 
course might here become acquainted and learn one another's 
viewpoint. The industrial service movement has been an attempt 
to link the interests of employer and emplo3fee together. But these 
movements have only scratched the surface. The distinctions based 
oh difference have persisted. It has remained for the war to bring 
the members of these opposing groups together. Camp and trench 
life know no class distinction. Rich and poor, educated and illit- 
erate, rub elbows and share common life. It is no uncommon sight 



THE WAR AND SOCIAL WORK 145 

to find four men with tliree different mother tongues sharing a 
tent together. The effect of this close companionship, this sharing 
of dangers in common, cannot help but breed a companionship 
which will do much to bring together men of different birth, breed- 
ing and social station. 

Another effect of this war has been to lessen sectarian and 
religious differences. Protestant, Roman Catholic and Jewish 
organizations are working side by side in our military camps. The 
contributions to the work of the Knights of Columbus and of the 
Y. M. C. A. have come from the community as a whole. Men of 
different faiths have served as members of the same teams in these 
drives. The lessons learned in this way are not likely to be foi-- 
gotten and the great charities to survive this war will probably 
draw their support from a wider public regardless of sectarian 
affiliation. 

We often heard at the beginning of this conflict that it was a 
rich man's war ; that this country had been drawn into it through 
the machinations of wealthy men who wished to make more wealth 
through army contracts. This charge has been pretty thoroughly 
disproven, and now little is heard of it. The rich have proved 
their patriotism as conclusively as any class in this country. They 
have contributed generously to our war charities, have submitted 
to unprecedented taxation with very little grumbling, have bought 
Liberty Bonds generously, and have seen their sons volunteer for 
military service with commendable pride. Many of our most 
efficient executives have contributed their time to the service of 
the Government. In fact, one of the most interesting and inspiring 
features of this war has been the service rendered by our men and 
women of wealth and social position. 

The war is also likely to change the extent and direction of the 
social movements in this country. In the early days most of the 
charitable work in this country was directed to the amelioration 
of the condition of some particular group of unfortunates. A 
group of their compatriots in this country would form a society 



146 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

for the assistance of Scotch widows. No study was made of the 
causes of this unfortunate situation. The widows were there and I 
their helpless condition called for aid. There was no attempt to 
reduce the number of widows by safeguarding the lives of their 
husbands. In this assistance there was much duplication as the 
number of these societies increased. Then came the attempt to 
eliminate this waste by the formation of societies to coordinate 
these charitable activities in our cities. Although the idea of 
constructive work entered the minds of these pioneers, the con- 
tributors were interested chiefly in the relief of want. 

It soon became evident that this want was the result of certain 
well-defined causes. Sickness, unemployment, intemperance and 
child labor were recognized as the causes of misery and the extent 
of these causes was studied by societies which worked for their 
removal. These activities soon brought the realization that many 
of these causes were social rather than individual. Sickness is 
sometimes caused by individual excesses, but it is also caused by 
unhealthful occupations and life in miserable tenements. We had 
held property rights as sacred, but when greed brought a train 
of social evils we directed our attention to regulation. It may be 
meritorious to help a widow whose husband has been killed at a 
machine, but it is equally meritorious to safeguard the machine 
that it may cease to be the cause of widowhood in the future. It 
is good philanthropy to assist those afflicted with tuberculosis, 
but it is better to remove the disease-breeding "lung blocks" from 
our communities. 

This brought the realization that these are community prob- 
lems which must be met by community action. The state legis-' 
latures were appealed to with ever increasing success, but Federal 
action was difficult to obtain. The war has made us impatient 
with half-measures. The exigency demanded immediate and drastic 
action. Things have been done to obtain efficiency which we would 
have considered impossible five years ago. The rights of private 
property have had to give way before community need. We have 



THE WAR AND SOCIAL WORK 147 

begun to deal on a larger scale with ultimate causes and less with 
the relief of apparent effects. This movement may receive a tem- 
porary setback at the close of the war, but as a community we 
have learned what is possible and this lesson will not be lost. 

Certain social reforms are being hastened by the war. We have 
long felt that certain practices were harmful or wasteful, but 
in our easy-going manner had kept putting the matter off in the 
hope that the evil would cure itself. The necessity of waging 
successful war has compelled the immediate elimination of this 
waste. Take one or two instances only. 

For a long time we have been more or less familiar with the 
financial, physical and spiritual waste resulting from the con- 
sumption of intoxicants in this country. We have been interested 
in this problem for a half century and various attempts have been 
made to eliminate the most serious evils connected with excessive 
drinking without interfering with a moderate use of alcohol. Our 
half-hearted attempts were not very successful and finally, after 
we had experienced a coal shortage, and had accepted wheatless 
and meatless days, the country at last made up its mind that 
intoxicants must go and the liquor traffic in this country appears 
to be doomed. It might have come sooner or later in any case, 
but the war has hastened the day. 

For a long time penologists have realized that it was poor 
economy to shut prisoners into dark and dismal cells, giving them 
but scant exercise with little or no employment and then to expect 
them, at the expiration of their terms, to be returned ready to 
take their proper places in society. We have realized that out- 
door labor on farms was one of the best things for this class 
because in this way the prisoners could be built up in health and 
be made more or less self-supporting while serving their terms. 
But we had the jails on hand and it was perhaps the easiest plan 
to lock the prisoners in their cells with the assurance that they 
could be found when wanted. The demand for farm labor has 
finally forced our jails and penitentiaries to give up the labor so 



148 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

sorely needed on the farms. It is probable that during the coming 
summer a million acres of land in this country will be tilled by 
those undergoing sentence. 

We had recognized for years the ravages of venereal disease 
upon our manhood and womanhood, and a national society and 
a large number of state societies had been organized to combat 
the evil. But when the figures began to be published showing the 
incidence of these diseases among our troops the public awoke to 
the seriousness of the situation. The Federal Government has taken 
steps to remove diseased women from the neighborhood of the 
army cantonments and naval bases. The Government is footing 
the bills for the treatment of these women in state institutions, 
where such exist, and is providing suitable facilities for their care 
in the states where no such opportunity for treatment existed. 
After the war the lesson we have learned in this way is not likely 
to be forgotten. Another lesson we have learned from the war has 
been that a considerable proportion of our young men are physi- 
cally below par. Poor care of the teeth and body, improper or 
insufficient food, lack of proper exercise, unhygienic methods of 
living, and various forms of excesses have produced a generation 
of young men many of whom are physically unfit for active mili- 
tary service. The importance of this fact has now been driven 
home, and although much had been said and written upon this 
subject in recent years, it will have added emphasis in the future. 

We have always had a democratic form of government, and 
have in a way considered this country an asylum for the op- 
pressed of all nations. For several years previous to the outbreak 
of the war in Europe, we had been receiving into this country 
immigrants at the rate of about a million a year. We had grad- 
ually increased the number of restrictions until most of the 
undesirable types were excluded. We had made the process of 
naturalization comparatively easy and had left it to the indi- 
vidual immigrant to decide whether or not he would become a 
citizen. We had recognized the desirability of Americanizing these 



THE WAR AND SOCIAL WORK 149 

immigrants as soon as possible, but had proceeded about the 
proposition in a more or less half-hearted way. The Y. M. C. A., 
through its industrial department, and through the industrial 
service work in connection with the colleges, had done consider- 
able to teach English and civics to the non-English-speaking 
foreigners. Several other organizations, some of them national in 
scope, had interested themselves in this problem, but our country 
seemed slow to appreciate the necessity of making true Americans 
from these various racial groups at the earliest possible moment. 
The war has brought home to us the fact that we have alien 
enemies in our midst and from this time we may expect to make 
a much more thoroughgoing attempt to Americanize these 
groups. The National Council of Defense is investigating this 
question at present and we may with confidence look to a well- 
considered plan of campaign from this body. 

The very fact that we were receiving from the Old World 
annually a gift of a million foreign-born, most of whom were in 
the active ages, has led us to think that the supply of labor for 
this country was assured. We were receiving from Europe all of 
the natural increase from a population half as large as our own. 
The ships that brought these hopeful workers to this country 
took back many who had been maimed in our industries. We had 
paid too little attention to this problem since the source of this 
supply of cheap labor seemed inexhaustible. Upon the declaration 
of hostilities in Europe, the stream of labor to this country sud- 
denly ceased and it is a serious question whether it will ever again 
reach its former proportion. Most of the European countries are 
going to be so drained of their young men that a large emigration 
from them is not to be expected for a long time to come. The 
demands for raw material and finished products from certain 
of the European countries has increased tremendously and a 
shortage of labor in this country has been the result. Concerns 
have bid against one another to secure sufficient labor and for 
the first time in years we have a condition in which the demand 



150 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

for labor of all kinds exceeds the supply. With the impossibility 
of securing this needed labor from abroad, we have realized the 
necessity of conserving the supply in this country. Every effort 
must be made to reduce the toll from accident and injury and to 
decrease the amount of sickness in the country. We may expect 
an increase in compensation insurance and in health insurance 
among the states. This summer we are having a campaign to 
save the lives of a hundred thousand children. This movement for 
the conservation of life would undoubtedly have come in time but 
has been hastened by the war. Thousands of our young men will 
be returned to us from overseas more or less crippled and steps 
are already being taken to give them expert training to fit them 
for some useful occupation. It is only a step to provide the same 
sort of training for those who are maimed in our industries. 

No matter what may be the waste in life and property resulting 
from such a conflict, if the people of this country can preserve in 
their purity the ideals with which they have entered upon this 
crusade, social workers may face the future with confidence. 



IX 

THE WAR AND CHURCH UNITY 

WILLISTON WALKER 

The great war has been conspicuously one of alliances. For its 
successful accomplishment cooperation and individual subordi- 
nation have been manifested in military, political and economic 
fields in heretofore unexampled fulness. Liberties, the result of 
long struggles, and deeply cherished, have been laid aside, for 
the time, that larger efficienc}?^ may be accomplished. Individual 
opinions strongly held have been subordinated to a common pur- 
pose. The time has witnessed a reappreciation of values in many 
realms. Much that in days of peace has seemed of importance, 
has appeared in the fierce light of war of relatively minor signifi- 
cance. A change of perspective has been the consequence. Has this 
result, so apparent in most realms of activity and of ordinary life, 
been manifest in the realm of religion.'' Are the same forces at 
work there also? An answer to these questions cannot as yet be 
fully formulated; but it is at least possible to indicate certain 
influences which are at work. 

The entry of the United States into the world-war has been 
in a degree unexampled in the history of this country a response 
to the appeal of righteousness. No action in which the nation has 
ever engaged has been so unselfish. We have taken our part in 
the struggle without hate, and with full consciousness of the 
prospective cost in life and treasure, that certain principles of 
justice may prevail, and that despotism, brutality and falsehood 
may not dominate the civilized world. We look for no indemnities, 
no annexations, and no pecuniary rewards. The American people 



152 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

has never more fully exhibited that idealism which, in spite of 
frequent misapprehension by those unacquainted with the real 
national spirit, is its fundamental characteristic. The consonance 
of this attitude with some primary teachings of religion is 
apparent. Self-sacrifice that the weak may be helped, that wrong 
may be resisted, and that a truer and juster order may be estab- 
lished among the nations, are aims that are closely akin to those 
of the Christian faith in its aspect of love to one's neighbor. Nor 
is it without evidential value to the essentially religious quality of 
American life that no enterprise has ever so united the people, 
and that Americans, whether so by long inheritance or immi- 
grants who have more recently caught the national spirit, have 
never before been so at one in a common endeavor. Nothing less 
noble, less idealistic, less in a true sense religious could so have 
fused them into one. 

The war, furthermore, has been a revelation of the fundamental 
purposefulness of the rising generation. The years immediately 
antecedent to the struggle saw not a little shaking of older heads 
over what were called the irresponsibility and pleasure-seeking of 
our young people. The call to arms has shown them as patriotic, 
as whole-hearted in devotion, as sacrificial as ever their elders 
were. They need bow in reverence to none who have gone before 
them. The cheerfulness with which a selective draft has been 
accepted, and in thousands of cases anticipated, has shown the 
readiness of youthful response to high appeal. This demonstration 
of the soundness, the earnestness and the unselfishness of those 
who are soon to be the leaders of the national life is full of religious 
encouragement. 

Equally heartening has been the cheerful and effective answer 
of the responsible population of America to limitations in food 
and drink that the needs of the Allies should be met and the 
national resources conserved. Doubtless other nations in the 
world-struggle have made larger sacrifices and endured far 
severer privations ; but the impressive quality of what America 



THE WAR AND CHURCH UNITY 153 

has done is that it has been so largely self-imposed, a voluntary 
sacrifice, in which suggestion rather than compulsion has been 
the task of its leaders. Strikingly impressive, also, has been the 
outpouring of wealth and effort to relieve human suffering 
through the Red Cross and kindred agencies, not only for the 
alleviation of the miseries of our own sons, but of the martyred 
population of Belgium, of France, of Poland and of Syria. No 
village has been too small, no community too remote or too rural, 
to have a share in this altruistic endeavor. Its spirit is in a true 
sense that of religion. More openly and professedly religious has 
been the marvelous work of the Young Men's Christian Association 
and of the Knights of Columbus. No previous war has seen any- 
thing comparable in extent of effort or scope of plan. The aim, 
and to a great extent the accomplishment, has been to cast 
Christian sympathy and brotherly helpfulness around the soldier 
and sailor in every camp at home and abroad, in the trenches, 
the hospitals, the battleships, the transports, and in the cities 
where his furlough is spent and his ideals so easily forgotten. 
These agencies have not labored for our own sons alone, but for 
those of France and Italy also. Even more impressive than the 
vast sums of money contributed from all over the United States 
for this cause have been the numbers and the quality of the men 
and women who have given themselves freely and in Christian 
consecration to this service. The Young Men's Christian Asso- 
ciation and the Knights of Columbus have been in truth the right 
arm of American Christianity stretched out to shelter, to hearten 
and to aid. They have been the agents .of the churches in their 
ministry. Without them the contribution of organized American 
Christianity would have been relatively ineffective. Through them 
that Christianity has exhibited itself in practical and achieving 
power as never before. 

The outstanding feature of these conspicuous manifestations 
of American religiovis life is that they have been absolutely un- 
dogmatic. Their type of Christianity has been broadly inclusive 



154 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

of what may be called universally accepted doctrine. Chaplains 
from most various denominational antecedents have labored 
together in a spirit of Christian comradeship, bearing only the 
sign of the cross. The workers, ministerial and lay, recruited by 
the Young Men's Christian Association have been drawn from all 
shades of American Evangelicalism and have wrought not only 
harmoniously one with another, but with the Knights of Columbus 
and with the representatives of Jewish faith. In common efforts 
to reach common needs, differences which loomed large at home 
have been laid aside. The requirements and experiences of our 
soldiers and sailors have been elemental, and these agencies have 
sought to meet them with a simple, earnest, uncontroversial 
Gospel, — the common denominator, if it may so be called, of our 
American Christianity. They have presented God, sin, salvation, 
faith in Christ, purity of life, brotherly helpfulness ; and to this 
presentation the young manhood of our armies and navies has 
been quick to respond. These young men have cared little as to 
the particular denominational label which these messengers may 
have worn at home. Spoken with manliness-; sincerity and 
sympathy, the message has won their hearts. 

These experiences have inevitably raised the question more 
insistently, which had already before the war been sounded in- 
creasingly loudly in our home churches, whether the divided state 
of American Christianity is to continue. It has long been deplored. 
Can it not be in a measure abated .^ A disposition to believe that 
it can is increasingly evident. The enlarging support given to 
the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ since the beginning 
of the war is significant of a growing conviction that at least a 
larger federal cooperation is not merely desirable but feasible. 
The much-divided Lutheran body has taken steps which promise 
its union in one fold. The last General Assembly of the Presby- 
terian Church of the United States has empowered a committee 
to issue a call for a Council to meet before the close of the present 
year by which practical action may be initiated looking towards 



THE WAR AND CHURCH UNITY 155 

the organic union of all American Evangelical Christianity. The 
Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States still urges 
its ambitious and remote plan of a World Conference on Faith 
and Order, aiming at a general reunion of Christendom ; though 
in this case the war seems to have delayed rather than furthered 
the project. In the local field, the scarcity of fuel during the 
recent winter led to hundreds of instances of temporary combi- 
nations of congregations representative of different denominations 
throughout the northern portion of the United States. Not only 
has no evil been the consequence, but better acquaintance and 
larger Christian sympathy have resulted. In some places, as in 
New Brunswick, N. J., these temporary unions have led to efforts 
to make these combinations permanent. It is evident that the 
possibility of a larger unity is being discussed as never before, 
and in a spirit which more than at any previous time tends to 
emphasize the great truths in which Christians are agreed and to 
minimize their differences. 

Will anything permanently effective come out of this widely 
diffused desire.'' Shall we be satisfied with the remarkable exhibi- 
tions of Christian cooperation in our army and navy, shall we 
entertain a pious wish that something similar may be achieved at 
home, and will the end of the war find us, nevertheless, in our 
present divided state .f* The answer will depend on the sacrificial 
willingness of our American Christianity. Is it ready to pay the 
cost.P That is a far-reaching question any answer to which is at 
present impossible, for the difficulties in the path of a larger 
union are enormous. Such a greater unity can be achieved only 
as several barriers of great strength are overthrown. 

One such barrier is the inertia of local organizations. Few 
American communities are not confessedly overchurched, as far 
as the Protestant population is concerned. The spectacle of eight 
or ten relatively feeble churches ministering to needs which two 
or three larger bodies could much more effectively meet is one 
exhibited in hundreds of communities. Yet effective consolidation 



156 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

is opposed by serious obstacles. Long custom, ancient disputes, 
denominational loyalties, keep these relatively feeble bodies 
asunder. These prejudices are hard to overcome. "Our fathers 
worshipped in this mountain," is a feeling not peculiar to 
Samaria. Much of this local loyalty is not without its commend- 
able qualities. It is bound up with traditions of parental piety, 
of devotion to a particular house of worship and to a congregation 
of believers in which one has grown up in the Christian life. These 
feelings are very real. Yet it is only as the advantages of a larger 
local unity become evident that our churches can rise to a greater 
consolidation and more effectively meet the local situation. Only 
the larger good can drive out the lesser goods. 

A further barrier, and one of no inconsiderable magnitude, 
which renders local union difficult is that our local churches are 
parts of large organic wholes for the advancement of the Kingdom 
of God at home and abroad. By their gifts, their sons and 
daughters and their prayers, the missionary societies are sup- 
ported, by which the outreaching work of the Kingdom of Christ 
is carried forward. These societies are now denominational. If 
two local churches are to become one, where will their joint con- 
tributions go? One has aided one group of missionary societies 
hitherto, the other another. Shall the new union divide its gifts ? If 
it does, will they be as extensive or the interest as great as for- 
merly.'^ These are practical questions for the missionary societies. 
The only final solution of such a situation would seem to be an 
extensive consolidation of the missionary societies themselves, so 
that they might become more representative of American Chris- 
tianity, at least of American Evangelical Christianity, as a whole, 
rather than simply the organs of particular denominations. 

A third barrier of difficulty barring the pathway of local con- 
solidation is that of ministerial and ecclesiastical responsibility. 
Each of the various denominations now has its definite method 
of entrance on its ministry, and of responsibility for the character 
and standing of those in its pastorates. Each holds itself bound 



THE WAR AND CHURCH UNITY 157 

to aid its feebler churches in their pecuniary necessities. If a new 
congregation results from the union of two or more existing 
bodies representative of diiferent denominations, where is the test 
of ministerial fitness, and the guarantee of continued ministerial 
standing to be found, and who is to aid such a church if finan- 
cially feeble? These are the problems which are often raised by 
the so-called "community church." Of course these difficulties are 
often met by the united organization attaching itself to the 
denomination originally represented by one of its component 
parts ; but this solution, though effective, makes so large demands 
on Christian self-denial as often to be impracticable in the 
present still comparatively feebly developed desire for unity. 

A still further barrier to unity, both on the local field and on 
the larger national scale, is the fact, often overlooked, that the 
separations of American Christianity are really due quite as 
much to differences of taste as to divergencies of doctrines or of 
polity. There is an Episcopal, a Presbyterian or a Methodist way 
of doing things that really differentiates these great families of 
believers quite as fully as their more generally acknowledged 
divergencies. They view the Christian life, they look upon worship, 
they express their deeper feelings, in unlike ways. The variet}'^ is 
not so much a diversity of belief as a contrast of temperaments. 
Being so, it is not susceptible to argument, or to adjustment by 
conventions or creedal agreements. It is to be met, if met at all, 
by the increasing spirit of democracy, which the war has done so 
much to foster. In proportion as the fundamental Christian 
democracy of America becomes a real consciousness these tempera- 
mental unlikenesses will tend to be subordinated to a larger unity 
of spirit. They will continue. Men are not all made in the same 
mould. But, it may be believed that they may be overcome bV a 
growing recognition of unity in variety. 

Moreover, in spite of an increasing longing that the multitu- 
dinous subdivisions of American Christianity be merged in a larger 
whole, much tenacious holding of peculiar denominational tenets 



158 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

will have to be overcome. The simplicity of the great truths which 
Christians hold in common will need to be more fully realized. 
Most American Evangelical denominations are now willing freely 
to admit that the essential verities of Christianity are held by 
their associated communions, and that a true Christian life is 
possible in each of them. The evident working of the spirit of 
God makes a denial impossible. But while each denomination is 
thus willing to recognize a real, if grudgingl}'^ admitted, sister- 
hood as the share of the others, each regards its peculiarities, of 
belief or practice as of extreme importance, if not to the being, 
at least to the well-being of the church, so that effective inter- 
communion seems impossible. An interesting illustration of this 
spirit has recently been shown in a discussion involving a com- 
munion which professes, one cannot doubt with sincerity, a desire 
for a reunion of Christendom. A proposition was made to it by 
a number of representatives of other communions, urging that 
the unity of American Christianity be illustrated by joint ordi- 
nations of chaplains for service with the army and navy. That 
proposal, which involved no question of ministerial status in the 
home churches, was declined by its highest authorities. It is not 
conceivable that those who thus refused it believed that chaplains 
went forth to their arduous task in the name of Christ from other 
communions without the blessing of God; but such differences of 
apprehension as may still coexist with obedience to the one 
Master are evidently yet deemed too great to permit mutual 
Christian authorization for service. Doubtless many similar in- 
stances could be found, but as long as they characterize American 
Christianity at all they reveal the persistence of a spirit which 
exalts denominational peculiarities above the full recognition of 
common Christian discipleship. 

These barriers have been thus frankly stated because they are 
very real, and while the impulse toward Christian unity now flows 
in increasing strength from the experiences of the great war, the 
movement in that direction must acquire far greater momentum 



THE WAR AND CHURCH UNITY 159 

before its work can be accomplished. Christian unity was never 
so fully before the thought of the American churches as now. 
Never were so many sincerely desirous of it. Never was its need 
so obvious as in these days when the church faces the tremendous 
problem of the reconstruction on a Christian basis of a shattered 
social order. It is a task which demands all the forces of an un- 
divided Christianity. Yet desirable as the goal of unity is, it will 
never be reached save through the strenuous cooperant effort of 
all who long for it. That effort must be greater than any hereto- 
fore made. It must be patient and persistent and in full faith that 
the Master's prayer for his disciples demands their utmost 
endeavor. 

Three steps are certainly needful for effective progress towards 
a larger unity: 

There must be a clearer recognition of the things in the Chris- 
tian faith which are of vital significance. The really great truths 
must be seen in their proper perspective. The simplicity of the 
Gospel must be increasingly recognized. We have too often 
elevated relatively subordinate convictions to an equality with 
the fundamentals of the faith. In this clearer perception of pro- 
portions the experiences of the religious work of the war is greatly 
aiding. We are seeing that in the Christian life we need not so 
many things as much. 

No less necessary is it that a spirit ready to sacrifice the 
important, but relatively subordinate, be developed. No denomi- 
nation is called upon to sacrifice alone. If unity is to be achieved, 
each must feel a willingness to subordinate that which though 
precious by custom or antiquity or cherished possession is yet 
divisive. 

Even more imperative is it that American religious bodies know 
each other better. Existing side by side, laboring in the same 
communities, it is amazing how little real comprehension of each 
other's spiritual life now exists. In mutual acquaintance by 
common association, wherever such intercourse can be brought 



160 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

about, lies the corrective of much present misunderstanding that 
separates us. All that aids a commqn acquaintance is an aid to 
ultimate unity. 

The consideration just mentioned makes it probable that the 
most promising present step is in the direction of federal 
cooperation. Religious bodies that are far from willing to sink 
their present differences may yet work in harmony, and by work- 
ing together increase that mutual understanding and thereby 
confidence in each other's Christian spirit which is so essential 
a preliminary to unity. That is what makes the Federal Council 
of the Churches of Christ and similar movements eminently 
worthy of support. They are not ends in themselves. They are 
means of utmost significance to a larger end. 

The war is showing a vision of our need and of the goal of our 
effort. That the road to a larger and more effective unity of the 
religious forces of America is full of difficulties is no reason why 
a Christian man should hesitate to tread it. It is as true now as 
when the Master said it, that "with God all things are possible." 



X 

THE RELIGIOUS BASIS OF WORLD 
RE-ORGANIZATION^ 

E. HERSHEY SNEATH 

When we reflect upon the situation of the race today, with the 
leading nations in the throes of a war of unparalleled dimensions 
and destructiveness, we are appalled at the impotency of those 
forces that heretofore have tended toward world-organization. 
Time was when international treaties and laws seemed to have at 
least a semblance of inhibiting sanctity, but in recent years they 
are regarded in certain quarters as mere "scraps of paper," and 
the supposed "rights" of nations are treated with scorn and con- 
tempt. The black flag of piracy, hitherto regarded as the sj^mbol 
of international outlawry, floats on the high seas, and the assassi- 
nation of neutrals and noncombatants is regarded by some as a 
national virtue. For centuries humane considerations obtained 
with reference to prisoners of war and to partially conquered 
nations. Now, certain nations have substituted for such humani- 
tarianism, outrage, brutality and enforced slavery. In short, 
international pact and law seem to have broken down. Their 
restraints have yielded to the unbridled force of national greed 
and lust for power. 

Again, in the past, the moral imperatives, independent of 
political treaties and laws, have exercised a wholesome constrain- 
ing and restraining influence on the relations of different peoples, 
and have made for fraternal world-organization. Man is consti- 

1 Address delivered at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the National 
Religious Education Association, New Yorls, March 5, 1918. Republished 
with modifications by courtesy of Religious Education. 



162 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

tutionally a moral being, and is, to a certain extent, governed by 
sentiments of justice and benevolence. These moral elements of 
our nature have led us to have regard for man as man, rather than 
for men as members of particular nations and races. Hence, in 
our interaction there has been a tendency to recognize and respect 
what we have been wont to call human rights as growing out of 
the essential constitution of personality. The same tendency has 
characterized our attitude toward men organized under political 
government. But alas ! these fundamental moral claims are now 
flagrantly violated. The morally right has, with some nations, 
degenerated into the right of might. 

Again, in the past, art has made for the unification of the race. 
The aesthetic consciousness is on the side of harmony. It hates 
chaos and loves order. It functions in the social and political 
spheres and tends toward unity rather than anarchy — toward 
peace rather than war. "Art binds together and unites the mem- 
bers of the nation; nay, all the members of a sphere of civilization; 
all those who have the same faith and the same ideals. Opinions 
and interests differ and produce discord ; art presents in sensuous 
symbols the ideals which are cherished by all, and so arouses the 
feeling that all are, in the last analysis, of the same mind, that all 
recognize and adore the same ultimate and highest things."" When 
we deal with the ideal we are dealing with the universal. Thus art 
transcends both individualism and nationalism. It contributes 
toward international good will. But how ineffective it has proven 
along these lines during the last few tragic years. One of the first 
great outrages of the war was the wanton bombardment of the 
beautiful Rheims cathedral. The world protested against this 
iconoclasm, but it continued. Vandalism and robbing nations of 
their art treasures are features of Kultur; so the breach between 
nations widens despite the supposed unifying power of art. The 
nation of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Mendelssohn and Wagner 
grips with mailed fist the throat of the nation of Michelangelo, 

2 Paulsen, "A System of Ethics," trans., p. 559. 



BASIS OF WORLD RE-ORGANIZATION 163 

Titian, Da Vinci, Correggio and Raphael, and tries to strangle the 
nation of David, Delacroix and Millet. The. nation of Lessing, 
Goethe and Schiller schools its children in a gospel of hate toward 
the nation of Shakespeare and Milton and a long line of glorious 
poets from Chaucer to Browning. The refining and organizing 
influences of art have given way to the brutal instincts of malevo- 
lence and greed, and a lofty idealism that bound the nations 
together in a golden chain of beauty finds the precious chain 
rudely broken. Art, like the other binding forces, has apparently 
failed in its work of unification. 

Another force that has been operative in world-organization is 
religion, and especially the Christian religion. With its proclama- 
tion of the universal fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man; 
with the law of love as its law of social interaction ; with its "Go 
ye into all the world and preach my gospel" — a gospel of univer- 
sal membership in a kingdom of supreme values — in which every 
member is on a moral equality with his neighbor — the Christian 
religion has been promotive of a spirit of good will among men, 
and of harmony among the nations. But what is the case today .^^ 
A nominally Christian nation joins bloody hands with a tradi- 
tionally murderous nation of Mohammedan faith in wholesale 
assassination of one of the most ancient Christian peoples, and 
attempts to incite the Moslem world to warfare against nations 
of Christian faith, merely to enhance her own selfish interests. 
Furthermore, in the present crisis we find Christian nation 
arrayed against Christian nation ; Protestant against Protestant ; 
Catholic against Catholic ; Protestant and Catholic united against 
Protestant and Catholic. Peoples in whose ears for centuries have 
rung the glad tidings of "peace on earth, good will toward men" 
are today gripping one another in mortal combat. The star of 
the East that, according to the story, guided the Wise Men to 
the maiiger of the Prince of Peace seems to have lost its radiance 
and directing power. Never since the star is said to have shone 
were men apparently farther from beating their swords into plow- 



164 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

shares and their spears into pruning hooks. The unifying power 
of him whose life illustrated even better than his parable of the 
Good Samaritan the highest law of human relationship is not in 
evidence today. Where is the power of that cross, the vision of 
which carried with it still another vision of a world attracted to, 
and unified by, the power of self-sacrificing love — "And I, if I be 
lifted up, will draw all men unto me".P Is the power of sacrificial 
love drawing the hearts of men and of nations together in the 
fellowship of Jesus Christ .^ Are not the dominant forces operating 
today centrifugal rather than centripetal? It is not the skeptic, 
or cynic, or pessimist, who asks these questions. They are the 
questions of thousands of earnest men and women who face the 
supreme crisis of human history. They bring home to us the fact 
that religion, even in its highest form, like international law, like 
morality, like art, however promotive of human brotherhood it 
has been, has failed in this most crucial test to prevent the dread- 
ful work of the destructive forces of mankind. This is a fact that 
the sincere believer in religion must face whether he wants to 
or not. 

In view of the failure of all of these more or less harmonizing 
and synthesizing forces to prevent such a gigantic war, what are 
we to say about world-organization after the conflict.'^ Nations 
must live and sustain relations to one another. They must establish 
some modus vivendi, and it must be founded on justice. The 
necessity of righteousness and good will in international relations 
has been made more apparent than ever by this most tragic con- 
flict. And the question arises : What organized forces are to 
establish such righteousness and good will among the nations.^ 
We must depend upon the very same forces that have been opera- 
tive in the past ; that is, upon international law, morality, art and 
religion, but they must be made more effective. How this may be 
done in the case of religion it is the aim of this paper to try to 
explain. 

In the first place, if religion is to become powerfully effective 



BASIS OF WORLD RE-ORGANIZATION 165 

in this direction, it must take a really ethical view of God. He 
must be regarded as essentially moral in his constitution ; as ruling 
in absolute righteousness, and a being whose ultimate aim with 
reference to men and the world is the realization of a new heaven 
and a new earth wherein righteousness is to dwell. Much as be- 
lievers in religion have said on this subject, the conceptions of 
many as expressed in belief and conduct have contradicted their 
words. When the nation of Martin Luther, including not merely 
the docile masses, but the spiritually enslaved clergy and servile 
university professors,^ among whom may be nuinbered such reli- 
gious leaders as Harnack, can accept and pray for the success 
of the war-program of a ruler who regards himself to be the 
vicegerent of the Almighty, cooperating with him in a scientifically 
organized movement for the triumph of the most diabolical forces 
the human race has ever witnessed — approving the vices of hell 
as though they were the virtues of heaven — this nominally Chris- 
tian nation is either guilty of awful blasphemy or it has lost its 
vision of an ethical God. Such a conception of the Deity proves 
divisive rather than unifying. It recognizes merely a partisan 
tribal Deity who cooperates with a people to realize its own ends, 
however unworthy and debasing those ends may be. Its influence 
is promotive of national selfishness, and makes against a brother- 
hood of nations. Professor Leuba speaks of the utilitarian ends 
for which men believe in God — making him hardly more than a 
meat purveyor;* but the German conception of God is much 
crasser than this.^ "Gott mit uns" is a God that is asked and 
believed to cooperate in the most damnable atrocities the human 
mind ever conceived in order to further low national aims. 

3 On the servility of German university professors consult David Jayne Hill, 
Harper's Magazine, July, 1918, pp. 30-33. 

i Monist, XI, p. 571. 

5 See, for example, the views of Pastors W. I^ehmann ("About the German 
God") ; H. Francke ("War Sermons") ; J. Rump ("War Devotions and 
Memorial Services for the Fallen") ; K. Konig ("Six War Sermons") ; also 
Tolzien and others in "Patriotic Evangelical War Lectures." 



166 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

Now, there is an important psychologj^ here that we must 
reckon with. Professor Stratton, in his work on "The Psychology 
of the Religious Life," calls attention to the fact that religion 
breeds conflict, it gives birth to opposites or antitheses, and he 
devotes nearly the entire volume to a consideration of these con- 
flicts. In one of his most interesting chapters*' he points out the 
fact that religion is productive of both breadth and narrowness 
of sympathy, of both social and anti-social feelings, of both 
egoism and altruism. He illustrates this in pointing out the exclu- 
siveness of some religions, such as that of the Jews, and of the 
catholicity of others, such as Buddhism and Christianity. He 
points out, also, the jealousy and intolerance of the monotheistic 
religions, such as Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism, as 
compared with polytheistic religions, like Buddhism. The former, 
like Elijah, are very jealous for their Lord, and such jealousy 
breeds narrowness and intolerance. It breeds exclusiveness, strife 
and often persecution. Now most of the conflict between narrow- 
ness and breadth of sympathy to which religion gives rise is due 
to wrong conceptions of the ethical nature of God. This manifests 
itself in many ways. God is conceived as a God of one people, 
rather than of others ; or of one people particularly and pecu- 
liarly, and of other peoples merely generally; or a God choosing 
and rewarding the elect and damning the non-elect ; or a God 
favoring only one mode of salvation peculiar to a certain people 
or sect, and hostile to all others ; or a God of one revelation rather 
than of another. In short, God is a God of favoritism instead of 
the impartial God and father of all mankind. Such a God is not 
a God of justice, much less of love. Such a conception is produc- 
tive of division, rather than of unity in the race. It begets strife, 
rather than harmony. Witness the religious wars that history 
records. Witness, for example, the history of the confl,ict between 
Mohammedanism and Christianity; between Protestantism and 
Catholicism. As a rule, religion is so involved in the life of a people 

6 Pt. I, ch. II. 



BASIS OF WORLD RE-ORGANIZATION 167 

that it becomes an integral part of their nationalism. Historians 
call attention to the fact that the monotheism of the Jews was 
largely the outgrowth of reflection upon their own history as a 
people. They saw in this history a Divinity that had shaped their 
ends, however roughhewn they may have been. They regarded 
themselves a "peculiar" people, specially chosen of God. For 
more than a century a similar belief prevailed in America. Our 
wonderful history led people to believe that we are a favored 
nation. God's providential government reveals a partiality for 
America when compared with other nations. With such concep- 
tions of a partial God, it is but a short step to making use of 
God for national ends, and, as illustrated in the case of the Ger- 
man nation today, only another step to conceiving God's willing- 
ness to cooperate in realizing ends which, in the judgment of the 
world, as expressed in international law, as well as in its own 
unwritten verdict, are regarded as unrighteous. Until the God 
of the race supersedes in actual belief and practice the God of 
nationalism ; until the God and father of all mankind displaces 
in our belief the God of sect or of one religion rather than of 
another; until the God of absolute and universal righteousness 
takes the place in our minds and hearts of the God of partiality 
and favoritism, which is the God of injustice; men and nations 
will not be bound together in one great and glorious fraternity. 
The root idea of religion is the idea of God, and as is our idea 
of God, so will our religious life be. If it is the idea of an un- 
righteous Deity, our individual, national and international life 
will be unrighteous. A fundamental necessity in the determination 
of the religious basis of world-organization is an ethical conception 
of God. 

In the second place, in our religious efforts at world-organiza- 
tion we must entertain and put in practice a far more ethical 
conception of man than we have in the past. The inalienable rights 
of personality must be recognized and their sancity remain 
inviolable. That valuation which Christianity places on man as 



168 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

man milst be seriously reckoned with in our reconstructive efforts 
after the war. Or, as Kant states it, every man must be regarded 
as an end in himself. He must not be used merely as a means to an 
end. The significance of this is, that there is an essential moral 
equality among men. On it all political relations, whether national 
or international, must be based. This means, first, that within each 
nation a true form of government, under whatsoever name it may 
be known, must be democratic. "It must derive its authority and 
power from the consent of the governed." Autocracy is opposed 
to moral and political equality. It treats its subjects as tools or 
instruments. It builds governments of force that ignore the moral 
and political claims of their own people, reducing them to a 
docility in which they are little more than "dumb driven cattle." 
Thus subjugated, they are schooled from childhood in a creed 
of jealousy and hatred of other nations. They can be hurled in 
masses "into the jaws of Death" in an unrighteous war of con- 
quest. Autocracy is upheld by militarism, and militarism means 
strife. On the other hand, militarism is upheld by autocracy. It 
first robs the people of its own nation of their rights and then 
proceeds to plunder other nations. It is essentially anti-social in 
character, and it is so because it is anti-moral. It overlooks the 
moral equality of men. The religion of the future must set its 
face like flint against this immoral view of man. It must emphasize 
the autonomy of the human spirit — the essential value of a soul 
that can determine its own conduct in the light of ideals of worth. 
Once it does this, democracy will assert itself in government, and 
autocracy, responsible for so many of the wars that have afflicted 
the race, will be abolished. 

In the next place, this essential moral equality of men, when 
recognized, means that their mutual relations will become more 
ethically articulate, and the law of social interaction will be at 
least the law of justice, and in a measure the law of love, — "Thou 
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," — which being interpreted 
means, that just as one is under obligations to labor for the 



BASIS OF WORLD RE-ORGANIZATION 169 

realization of the highest good in one's own person, so he is under 
obligations to work for the realization of the highest good in the 
person of others. And this highest law of human relationship must 
be recognized, not merely as obligatory upon individuals in their 
relations to other individuals, but also upon nations in their 
mutual relations. Morality is transcendental in its character. It 
overleaps the bounds of individualism. It knows not men merely, 
nor nations merely, nor groups of nations merely; — it knows the 
race. It knows man, rather than men. It is difficult for us to realize 
this. Just as it was hard for primitive tribes to realize any obliga- 
tions to other tribes, so today, notwithstanding centuries of so- 
called civilization, somehow or other an international morality 
fails to have the binding force either of personal, community, or 
national morality. The righteousness that exalts a people seems 
largely to be a righteousness within its own borders. Egoism in a 
nation is just as blameworthy as egoism in an individual. In the 
vast group of nations, no nation liveth unto itself alone, if it is 
to live according to the moral law of benevolence, or according 
to the Christian law of love. The religion of the future must, in 
its practical belief, emphasize this fact far more than it has in 
the past. Nations are simply larger human units, and the moral 
law in its obligations applies just as truly to their interrelations 
as it does to those of individuals. Its demands are no more 
Utopian in the former case than in the latter. It can at least 
serve as an ideal or guide to conduct. As in the case of individuals, 
so in the case of nations, each has its rights, and in their mutual 
relations the moral law or the law of love requires the recognition 
of the rights or just claims of each. As President Wilson said in 
his memorable message to Congress on April 2, 1917: "We are 
at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the 
same standards of conduct and of responsibility for wrong done 
shall be observed among nations and their governments that are 
observed among individuals of civilized states." And again: "It 
is clear that nations must in the future be governed by the same 



170 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

high code of honor that we demand of Individuals." Of course the 
cynical political philosopher and "practical" stateman will regard 
this as "unpractical idealism." But the ethics of the Nazarene will 
prove far more effective in promoting a satisfactory modus vivendi 
among the nations than the revived Machiavellianism of modern 
Germany, or the ethics of a Nietzsche, a Treitschke, and a Bern- 
hardt We see the inevitable outcome of the latter in the most 
ghastly war of all history. There never will be peace on such a 
brutally egoistic basis as that laid down in the political philosophy 
of these writers so prized by many Germans. The doctrines of the 
superman with their contempt for the weak, and of war as a 
^'biological necessity," so dear to Junkerdom, are confessedly the 
affirmation that "might makes right." If peace be attainable and 
preservable on such a basis, and the lion and the lamb are to lie 
down together, it will only be as the lamb lies inside of the lion. 
Some lamb-like pacifists and "conscientious objectors" to war may 
be content with such a place of residence; but physically and 
morally red-blooded and self-respecting men and nations not only 
prefer, but feel it a moral obligation to maintain the individual and 
national self against an unscrupulous and barbarous aggressor and 
destroyer. They feel so, too, in obedience to the Christian com- 
mand, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" — a command that 
not only includes self as the object of moral regard, but that makes 
it the norm according to which we are to determine our duty to 
others. Men and nations do feel morally responsible for their own 
preservation and development, and will, as a rule, defend the 
essential conditions of these against unjustifiable attack. Hence, 
as long as nations exist, war will remain a possibility. The only 
way to avert it is through mutual respect for fundamental rights. 
Both the law of benevolence and the Christian law of love demand 
this. Indeed, they demand more ! They call for a manifestation 
or fuller expression of good will and fraternal regard both in 
feeling and in conduct. 

Now, in the work of establishing a real brotherhood among 



BASIS OF WORLD RE-ORGANIZATION 171 

individuals and among nations, religion has the advantage over 
mere morality, for it can avail itself of the power of the religious 
sanctions in trying to realize the kingdom of righteousness. But, 
on the other hand, a subtle danger lurks in religion which it may 
be well to point out here, and which must be guarded against in 
our future efforts at community, national and world-organization, 
for it tends to subordinate the ethical element in religion, and often 
degenerates into an anti-social program. According to the sanest 
views of the psychology of religion, the whole mind as intellect, 
sensibility and will functions in the religious consciousness. 
Because of this, there is a possibility of developing a wrong sense 
of values in the religious life. There has been a notable tendency 
in human history to stress the intellectual element in religion. This 
has resulted in a large body of doctrine which frequently assumes 
extraordinary significance. The main thing, then, is to give intel- 
lectual assent to dogma and creed. Orthodoxy of belief rather than 
orthodoxy of life becomes the primary thing. The ethical element 
in religion is subordinated to intellectual belief. And how divisive 
and anti-social, rather than unifying, dogma has been, and how 
deadening to real moral endeavor ! This constitutes a long and 
very tragic chapter in the history of Christianity, as well as of 
other religions. 

Again, there has been another marked tendency in the history 
of religion and that is the substitution of the religion of feeling 
for the religion of will. Pietism and sentimentalism have supplanted 
in a large measure the ethical. Such religion is dominantly non- 
social, if not, indeed, anti-social in its character. It does not make 
for brotherhood. The pietistic monk shuts himself in a monastery 
and tries to work out his soul's salvation with fear and trembling, 
rather than to work it out by aiding his neighbor or society to 
work out theirs. Buddhism and Christianity have been most un- 
fortunate victims of this substitution of solitude for solidarity. 
Dean Brown once said to the writer that there is a great deal of 
pietism that is utterly wanting in ethical quality, and that is true. 



172 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

It is a kind of selfish subjectivism devoid of any real moral char- 
acter. It is self-centered and non-social. It represents the minimum 
of true religion. Where in such pietism do we find the universality 
of obligation involved in the ethical law of benevolence or in the 
Christian law of love.^ Such religion does not bear the marks of 
a really socialized gospel. It has developed a wrong sense of values. 

Again, there is in practically all religions a large element of 
symbolism — the religious life expressing itself in worship — in rites 
and ceremony. And this carries with it a dangerous tendency in 
evaluation. It often substitutes ritual and ceremonial for what is 
the real essence of religion — namely, righteousness. The great 
Hebrew prophets contended strongly against this misinterpreta- 
tion of religion. With them it represented an erroneous estimate 
of the essentials of religion. Indeed, it threatened its very life — 
the heart of which in their conception is righteousness in God and 
man. Isaiah represents Jehovah as being weary of sacrifice, in- 
cense and other forms of worship — regarding them as an abomi- 
nation, and calling upon the people to live a life of righteousness : 
"Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings 
from before mine eyes ; cease to do evil ; learn to do well ; seek 
justice, relieve the oppressed. '"^ Hosea exclaims : "I desired 
mercy, and not* sacrifice."^ Micah, inveighing against burnt offer- 
ings, says : "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good, and what 
doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, 
and to walk humbly with thy God.?"^ And Jesus, all through the 
Sermon on the Moiint and in the parables, in the most positive 
manner represents righteous living as the very core of religion. 

All of these elements — the intellectual, the pietistic, the aesthetic 
or symbolical — have a rightful place in the religious life, but they 
are all subordinate, and exceedingly subordinate, to the one great 
dominating element, the moral. And it is because of a failure to 
adequately recognize and practise this element that so many sup- 

7 Isaiah 2:10. 

8 Hosea 6:6. 

9 Micah 6:8. 



BASIS OF WORLD RE-ORGANIZATION 173 

posedly Christian nations are today in deadly conflict. All of 
them persist in their theological beliefs ; all of them persist in 
pietistic communion; all of them persist in rite and ceremony; 
but some of them at least fail even to approximate the exemplifica- 
tion of the fundamental ethical requirements of their faith. Their 
theology, their pietism, their worship, — their religion,^ — have not 
been moralized; and unless we are willing to make, both in belief 
and practice, the religious basis of world-organization truly 
ethical, we will fail as lamentably in the future as we have in the 
past. 

Finally, how is such a religious program to be carried forward .^ 
The answer is, by systematic religious education. Such an educa- 
tional procedure involves beginning at the beginning, and that is, 
with the child. Here, again, we meet with a melancholy failure in 
the development of a true sense of values. Despite the progress 
that modern religious educational effort has made, there is still 
a widespread lack of genuine appreciation of the importance of 
childhood for moral and religious instruction. The premium is 
still placed on the adult. We have but to examine the average 
church program to be convinced of this. In a large number of 
churches we have three Sunday services — two of which are devoted 
to adults and one to children. In the average church the week- 
day services are largely services for adults. Our sermons, our 
hymns, our prayers, many of our week-day meetings cover chiefly 
the interests of grown-ups ; and the lamentable condition of home 
religious education painfully fails to make up this deficiency in 
what Dr. Horace Bushnell called Christian nurture. Indeed, under 
a false conception of conversion, and a false apprehension of the 
spiritual birthright of children in most Protestant quarters, the 
child, as the late Professor George P. Fisher once remarked to 
the writer, is regarded as an alien to the Commonwealth of Israel. 
Instead of being born into the church and treated as a member 
of the household of faith, he must serve his probation as a heathen, 
and await the dawn of adolescence when he will have developed 



174 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

sufficient maturity of mind to interpret and give intellectual 
assent to a creed. The absurdity and tragedy of it all are manifest 
when we take into consideration the ethical character of religion, 
and the fact that childhood is preeminently the period for estab- 
lishing the individual in habits of virtue. There may be some 
exaggeration in Dr. G. Stanley Hall's affirmation, that the moral 
and spiritual destiny of the average person is determined in the 
first ten years of his life; but, to anyone who has studied the 
psychology of moral and spiritual development, it is evident that 
Hall is dealing with far more than a half-truth. The receptivity 
and plasticity of the child make it possible for those to whom his. 
most vital interests are committed to really save him or damn 
him. And, as we establish children in right thinking and right 
living, so we establish the community, the state, the nation, and 
ultimately the nations in their reciprocal relations. In more ways 
than one is Wordsworth's statement true, "The child is father to 
the man." It is preeminently true in the moral and religious 
sphere. The Kingdom of God and hi,s righteousness will never 
make the progress on earth that they should make until the scales 
really fall from our eyes, and we gain a true vision of our duty to 
the child in establishing him in personal and community righteous- 
ness, and thus pave the way for the application of the law of 
righteousness in the state and among the nations of the earth. 

In still another way, to one who is convinced of the supremacy 
of moral and spiritual worths and of the ethical aim of all true 
religion, is the lamentable failure to develop a true sense of values 
manifest. Professor Pratt calls attention in his "Psychology of 
Religious Belief" to what he regards to be a fact, that in the aver- 
age American community, "we find our friends and neighbors, of 
all degrees of education and intellectual ability, almost to a man 
accepting God as one of the best recognized realities of their 
world and as simply not to be questioned. "^° That statement is 
in the main true. In other words, we are a religious people. And 

10 Page 231. ' 



BASIS OF WORLD RE-ORGANIZATION 175 

yet, notwithstanding this fact, so far as thoroughgoing, sys- 
tematic religious education is concerned, when compared with the 
time and efforts devoted to education along other lines, and its 
quality, it suffers painfully. In nearly all of the states, five days a 
week, of at least four or five hours each, are given to what we call 
secular education, as against one day per week, of one hour each, 
to religious instruction and worship. In secular education we have, 
on the whole, a trained body of teachers. In religious education 
we are dependent largely on amateurs. In most places religion is 
not allowed a voice in our schools, so far as systematic training is 
concerned, and in comparatively few communities has a systematic 
course of moral training even been introduced. What does all 
this mean.'' Does it not mean that we err tremendously in our sense 
of values.'' If there is any doubt concerning this, reflect for a 
moment on the possibility of organizing a community on a basis 
of the vices instead of the virtues. Try to found a community on 
sensuality, falsehood, dishonesty, injustice, hate and murder, and 
see how far you will succeed. Society could not exist on such a 
basis. Were the German people to put into practice among them- 
selves the vices and crimes they have committed against other 
peoples, their existence as a nation would be exceedingly short- 
lived. The vices are anti-social in their character. The virtues are 
social : they make for unity, for organization. And what is true 
of communities is true of states and nations — not only in their 
internal relations but in their relations to other nations. The 
virtues make for national and international organization. Now, 
religion deals with these sovereign values, and yet, comparatively 
speaking, we — a religious people — relegate them to the back- 
ground in our educational schemes. We will never succeed in world- 
organization until we genuinely appreciate the unifying poAver 
of the virtues, the harmonizing and binding force of righteousness, 
and systematically train a generation from childhood in a knowl- 
edge and an appreciation of their supreme worth, and try to 
mould their wills in conformity to their requirements. 



176 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

But, as Herbert Spencer wisely remarks, we have not an ideal 
environment in which to work out our ideals. And that is eminently 
true in this case ; therefore, wisdom dictates that we try to do our 
work with reference to the conditions of the actual environment in 
which we are placed. If, for apparently good reasons, it be not 
expedient under present conditions to introduce systematic reli- 
gious education into the public schools, it is possible for us to make 
provision in some other way for religion to have its rightful place 
in the general training of our children. This would require a 
religious school organization, with a curriculum that interprets 
religion as ethical in its aim. It would require a scientifically 
graded moral scheme with its corresponding religious sanctions ; 
also the creation of a literature to meet these demands. It would 
require, at least, three sessions a week. It should be separate from 
the Sunday school, where, with present conditions, sectarianism 
still enters into education, and yet it should be supplementary to 
it. It would call for a specially trained teaching force; and for 
skilled professional supervision. All this ought to be done; it can 
be done; and it must be done. We must do it in the interests of 
the individual, of the family, of the community, of the state, of 
the nation, and of the brotherhood of nations. It is a thoroughly 
practicable scheme. The literature exists already; colleges, schools 
of religion, and theological seminaries can easily become training 
schools for the preparation of religious teachers. The only diffi- 
culty in the way, which is, indeed, a serious one, but by no means 
insuperable, is the time-schedule of the children. In my own judg- 
ment, if a real effort were made by the churches of any community, 
a plan could be formulated in relation to the public schools 
whereby the children would become available for such religious 
instruction. If the community is a religious one, it has a right to, 
and must insist upon, having the children a fair share of the time 
for such purposes. If the moral and spiritual values are the su- 
preme values of society, then it is in the interests of society itself 
that these values should receive proper recognition in formal 



BASIS OF WORLD RE-ORGANIZATION 177 

education for citizenship. The real trouble is, that the churches 
are not really in earnest concerning this important matter. It has 
taken an awful social cataclysm to make us realize that nations, 
like families and communities, can hang together on no other 
basis than the cardinal virtues, and that something more than 
a mere formal recognition of these virtues is required for 
world-organization. Men and nations must be disciplined in them, 
and the way to do this is to begin in childhood. If the schooling 
of a nation in a gospel of national egoism and hate be largely 
responsible for the present war, with the brutal indifference of 
the German people to moral considerations in provoking it and 
to humane methods of waging it, why is it not possible to school 
the nations in those things that make for good will and world- 
organization .^ To doubt it is to doubt the might of right. 

In conclusion, my plea is, that, in our efforts at world re- 
organization, so far as religion is concerned, we adequately 
reckon with its ethical character. Let us take, first, an ethical 
view of God — that he is a righteous being, that he deals justly 
with all men and all nations, that he cannot be used by any 
individual or nation for unrighteous ends, that he is the father 
of us all, and that he cooperates with men in their efforts to 
bring in the reign of righteousness upon earth. And, secondly, 
let us take a more ethical view of man ; recognizing the worth 
and inalienable rights of personality; that no man may be used 
merely as a means, but must be regarded as an end in himself; 
and thus, whatever may be the outward form of government, it 
must in essence be democratic, rather than autocratic; that the 
law of interaction among nations must be the same as the law 
among individuals — the law of benevolence or the law of love. Let 
us develop a true sense of values in religion that will place em- 
phasis on the voluntaristic or ethical element rather than on either 
the intellectual, pietistic and symbolical or aesthetic. Finally, let 
us try to realize this program by thorough, systematic religious 
education in which we shall emphasize the interests of the child 



178 RELIGION AND THE WAR 

rather than the interests of the adult ; by giving an ethical inter- 
pretation to the curriculum; by organizing a trained body of 
teachers ; and by insisting that a fair amount of the child's time 
and effort shall be devoted to education in the supreme values of 
society. If we act on this program, if we make this really the 
religious basis of world re-organization, we will make long strides 
toward the dawn of a better day, when nations shall seek war no 
more; and the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms 
of our righteous God and his Christ, whose gospel and life teach 
the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood 
of man. 



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